


The Other Point Man

by pushdragon



Category: Inception
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Action/Adventure, Beards, Espionage, Explosions, Grenade Launchers, Helicopters, Kissing, Lashings of hurt/comfort, M/M, Romance, Tanks, Weapons of Mass Destruction, missiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:13:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur/Eames feat. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/12/09/richard-armitage-interview-the-hobbit-martin-freeman_n_4413016.html">Richard Armitage</a>! </p><p>When their team is commissioned to steal nuclear secrets from a brutal regime, the stakes are already deadly. Even worse, Arthur will be working under a rival point man, who’s made his name by breaking rules and gambling with people’s lives. In the role of the Other Point Man, Richard Armitage piles on all the wounded gravitas of Lucas North, the boys-own heroics of John Porter, and a dash of Thorin Oakenshield.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When he got to the abandoned bakery in Kerman they were using for a rendezvous and a base, Flynn was there already. Of course. The usual mist of urgency radiated off him, as if he'd just arrived, probably via parachute drop by means of an improvised length of aluminium sheeting, floating down with the fall of night. 

In the end, Arthur discarded the first three things which came into his mind, and said, "Did you get that from an enemy or a friend?"

He dumped his travel bag on an empty chair and dropped his jacket on top of it.

"I didn't exactly have the time to ask them which way they leant on that question." Flynn shrugged with his usual epic nonchalance, and didn't look up. "But nothing says friendship like a helicopter chase through the Carpathians." 

Flynn was hunched over the table putting the finishing knots on a set of stitches along a re-opened gash in his forearm. One end of the thread between his teeth, he pulled the other tight and sliced off the excess one-handed with the knife that lay beside the first aid kit.

"You're good to go then?" Arthur said dubiously.

The fact that Flynn was wearing grease-smeared combat fatigues, a thin green vest and a vast expanse of bare arm muscle didn't answer the question. John Flynn didn't do civilian, unless it was his best bespoke formal wear for an occasion where he could pretend to be the guy who taught Bond his tricks. Otherwise, if he was found in a jacket, it was bound to be the kind that deflected bullets. Flynn always, without fail, looked the part. In iced-over Moscow, Arthur had seen him swanning around in desert combat gear. 

"Never catch me any other way," Flynn answered, standing up from the table with a roll of battle-honed shoulders that underlined the point. "Some of us don't suit the quiet life."

Arthur could have forgiven Flynn for pushing machismo to the point of parody. Could have forgiven him for being drawn to knife-edge plans instead of good ones; for his tendency to put lap dancers and high-powered explosives into jobs that didn't need them. Could have forgiven him – could almost have forgiven him – enough to take him to bed, just once, because it was a shame to waste all those lethally efficient muscles merely because of the personality that happened to go with them. 

But Arthur couldn't forgive him for being all that, and a point man too.

"Looks septic around the edges there," he observed helpfully. "Let me know if you need me to tidy it up for you."

**

The chemist who was running the job, at least, had one of the coolest heads in the business. An old colleague of Cobb's from his student days in Paris, Nasrin was the same surprising combination of firebrand revolutionary and shrewd extortionist Arthur remembered from their previous work. 

They were in the low-ceilinged dining room of the living quarters that had once housed the baker’s family, before the son’s ill-advised political connections and hasty marriage had sent them fleeing for the border. 

"And then what?" he prompted, watching her pin up schematics of nuclear and non-nuclear warheads to help the team commit the difference to memory. "Say we find the ultimate smoking gun, complete with the President's own fingerprint right on it. You can't blackmail the Guardian Council. According to them, they answer direct to God. They won't be ashamed of a few prototypes for weapons of mass destruction."

She looked at him like he'd just informed her that the desert, here in Iran, was dry. Then she went back to her pins. 

"It's your people who will buy," she told him. "They always want an excuse up their sleeves. Every administration needs a new villain. Oh yes, when things are slow, the armaments sector will empty its pockets to drum up a little business." 

He was impressed by her commitment. "You'd sell out your own country. The money must be good."

She came back to the table to pour herself a fresh cup of tea, added a lump of sugar, and smiled darkly at him over the rim. "The next job I'm planning will require a little more start-up money than usual."

At the rumble of a truck – probably military – passing outside, both of them fell still, ears pricked. The noise receded, replaced by the sound of boots swinging up onto the roof and efficiently crossing the tiled surface to drop into the courtyard behind the house.

Eames was reclining on the side of the ornamental pool by the time Arthur opened the back door, with his bare feet submersed in the shallow water and his shoes and socks discarded by his side. The kit bag dumped on the terracotta tiles, apparently housing everything he had seen fit to bring, couldn't contain much more than a gun, a comb and a couple of changes of clothes. His usual eccentric colonial look had been discarded for an Arab-style checkered headdress that was out of place this far north of the Gulf coast, and the bulge in his hip pocket looked the right size for a grenade. 

"Nice work," Arthur told him. "Was that one of our marks you hitched along with?"

"Always a pleasure, Arthur. Don't thank me for getting here early. To put your mind at rest, they never knew I was there. I hopped on quietly at Bandar-e Abbas."

Eight hours on the top of a truck. That would be Flynn's bad influence throwing spanners in the works already. He'd warned Nasrin about the sort of disasters the two of them combined were likely to bring about on a job. Although they'd only known each other by reputation, until now, in both cases it was a fairly incendiary reputation. 

"Then I assume you won't need the pick-up I arranged for you tomorrow in Bushehr."

Eames looked up at him, finally. When he removed the red checkered keffiyeh, his hair was oily, sticking to his forehead, and his eyes were bloodshot. "I could do with a drink. Don't the pipes run with sherbet in these parts? The trip left me a little parched by about the sixth hour in."

Arthur told him he was a few hundred years too late for concubines bearing sherbet cups, but fetched him a cold can of lemonade anyway. Eames and Flynn had the same ungovernable streak. Eames stirred up trouble for sheer entertainment, and Flynn was a magnet for it. It would either unite them in a reckless alliance that could become Arthur's worst nightmare, or set them at each other's throats. If it turned out to be the latter, Arthur was going to have to lay down some solid groundwork for mollifying or distracting one of them. He couldn't say exactly what had led him to the odd conclusion that he had a better chance with Eames. 

**

The unique chemistry of Eames and Flynn, as it transpired, left his worst nightmares quite emphatically in the shade.

Eames had done a little military contracting in his time, or so Arthur deduced from some gaps in his history and that short prison stint in Tripoli. Dirty stuff. Off-book and highly deniable for the controversy-shy governments involved. That kind of turf, of course, was Flynn's stock in trade – the more controversial the assignment, the more relish he took in accepting it. That was enough, apparently, to make them blood brothers from their first brawny handshake.

Eames certainly had Flynn's full attention as he held the floor. 

"If there's one thing you can assume in an autocratic state," Eames was expounding in the softly-spoken novice professorial tone he pulled on out of nowhere in meetings, throwing Arthur for a loop every time. "It's paranoid mistrust. The guards might be easier to get a needle into, but do they know where the warheads are being kept? Unlikely."

"Then we need to go higher up." said Flynn with the urgency of a battlefield crisis. "You’re right. We have to take down one of the commanders."

"Too well guarded. But the research scientists down there-" 

"They need to be able to check on the maintenance. They have to know where it's stored. We go to them, then. Down into the bunker. We'll need to go in better armed."

"Or take the chance of lifting something high powered once we're inside."

"Not going to happen," Arthur told them firmly, with the sense of breaking into a private flirtation. "The high-ups will all be militarised, no question about it. And we are not breaking into a secure military facility until we've tried every other option." 

Flynn leaned back in his chair, conspicuously shifting about the dense muscles he wore like a breastplate behind his khaki vest. 

"Have you forgotten, Arthur, that your extractor is a master forger?" The pen in Arthur's grasp dug painfully into his clenching fingers. "Let's use our resources. Eames can forge the mark. Militarisation won't attack the very man it was designed to protect." 

Arthur was a professional. The ice in his response had nothing to do with the fact that, while Arthur would be running point in the dream levels, the topside operations all belonged to Flynn. "There is no research on that. None whatsoever."

Flynn shrugged. "I've as good as done it. In Bogota. The mark was ex-CIA, best militarisation on the–"

"Not going to happen."

"Putting your low opinion of my professional capability to one side, Arthur," Eames said crisply, "We have yet to resolve the basic problem. The personnel stationed above ground are also the least likely to have the information we need."

Since Eames had done absolutely nothing since his arrival to deserve having his ego fed, Arthur let him keep his misconceptions and settled for a protracted glare. "So let's resolve it."

"All right," said Nasrin calmly. "We keep looking for a mark from the above-ground barracks. The guards don't need an official briefing to guess where the high-security materials are being kept, but we do need to find one that spends some time in the bunker. If that angle hits the wall, we'll have to find a way underground, try out your forgery plan on one of the research scientists. We need to go down there to get our photo evidence anyway. Logistics for that bit are yours, John. It has to be squeaky clean, no bullets fired, no bodies to give us away. Still think you can do it?"

It must be the gleaming bulk of his upper arms. Flynn had a way of shrugging that conveyed a complete absence of doubt. He locked eyes with Eames for a moment, conspiratorially, and Arthur could practically feel a grenade launcher or two being added into the plan.

"I'll get on with the build then, shall I?" Arthur said sourly and left them to work on a plan which, most likely, would require a pyrotechnics budget that the average producer of Hollywood blockbusters would blanch at. 

**

When he came back, Eames was face-down on the floor with Flynn spread out on top of him. This was not within the bounds of what Arthur would hitherto have considered normal conduct, even for these two.

He distractedly revisited his assumption that Flynn was every bit the ladies' man which his occasional dismissive anecdotes and all-round cockiness suggested. In the heap of writhing limbs, it was hard at first to tell which firmly muscled forearm belonged to which brutally toned body. Then he caught sight of the fresh line of stitches – that was Flynn on top. He had Eames bucking underneath him, one hand barely spanning the breadth of a naked bicep and the other pushing down above the shoulder blade. They gasped hard, breath straining out in growls. 

It was the sort of wild pornography that every studio in LA would like to sell on a per-view basis, if only it could be replicated for the cameras. Arthur could practically taste the sweat down Eames's back, dripping forward over his shoulders as he dug in his elbows and lifted his hips up off the wood floor with a force that should have been impossible with Flynn's full weight on him. Christ, Eames's thighs were like stone pillars – Arthur had never seen them in action before, not like this, and his hands clenched at the thought of grasping them, with all that powerful bulk veiled by nothing but skin. 

And Flynn, Flynn was a whole lot harder to dislike with his ass curved up like that, a hard, functional muscle that flexed he fought back, shoving Eames down into submission with a testosterone-drenched grunt. Whatever this was, Flynn seemed to have the upper hand.

"Difference of opinion?" Arthur asked in his firmest voice.

Two things happened in quick succession. Flynn said with lazy derision, "Nothing worse than your average platoon mess hall at the end of a campaign." And Eames shifted his left leg up, braced his foot wide on the floor, and in a burst of animal strength flung Flynn off his back. His fist, huge and looming over Flynn's face, settled the victory.

Flynn shrugged off the loss like he might do with a three-storey tumble or a slightly-less-than-fatal chest wound. It was Eames who looked uncomfortable, turning his gaze onto the rather battered pack strapped across his chest instead of acknowledging Arthur's entrance.

"That's settled it then," he said, helping Flynn to his feet in a mutual clench of arm muscle that made Arthur's mouth a bit dry. "We can’t count on disarming an opponent without risking damage to the PASIV."

Flynn's mouth made a doubtful shape. "I still say it depends on the opponent."

Eames shook his head, his chest still visibly expanding and contracting until he ditched the pack and pulled his shirt back on over the white vest he'd been fighting in. "One of us has to keep clear. That leaves two guards each for the rest of us."

"There is no way we're going in the front," Arthur protested, horrified. "Even by your standards, that's not quiet or clean."

Flynn, who had no shirt to put back on, merely stretched one hand back with the other as if eliminating a minor tendon strain. "That part was always unrealistic. When there's no other option, you put your body on the line and trust yourself to survive the worst of it."

Arthur let a few seconds pass, savouring every one of them with the sweetest anticipation while Flynn switched hands and kept up his flexing. 

"Or you could break into the archives of BP and dig up some geological records from the days when Anglo-Persian Oil used to drill here."

Flynn's smile was frosty. "We can always rely on you to do the drab back-room work, Arthur. Well done." 

Restoring his relentlessly unflattering side part, Eames just grinned, "Let's see it then."

**

The bunker was built beneath the ruins of a mud-brick caravanserai. In its heyday, sometime around the seventeenth century, it would have ended the first day's ride on the long overland journey back towards Yazd and Isfahan. These days, what remained of its walls were painted with old revolutionary slogans in Farsi and built upon with the modern brick and steel of the above-ground barracks. It was illuminated unevenly from floodlights above the two sentry towers.

The scattered pistachio trees outside its walls, mere shadows in the second-hand light, were most likely the survivors of a much larger orchard, which had thrived on snowmelt brought by underground tunnels from the mountains to the north-east. The centuries-old subterranean qanat system, painstakingly dug over dozens of miles, had fallen out of mind now that the barracks complex had its own modern water supply. Or at least Arthur hoped as he climbed down into a four-foot wide ditch where the roof of one of the subsidiary channels had collapsed, creating an entry point for their team. 

The torch approaching at a slow crawl from the depths of the tunnel swiftly resolved itself into Flynn.

"Blockage up ahead," Flynn reported as he straightened up from his crouch, which explained the damp soil scraped along his shoulders and stuck to his hands. "It's a tight fit. We can't spend all night shovelling. I've got a stick of C4 back in my kit in the car. No trigger, though – I'll have to wing it."

He was already climbing up, towards the crest of the hill to where they'd parked, as if he had some sort of genetic inability to parse the words "quiet" and "clean". 

Nasrin hissed after him, "That's a little noisy for our needs, John."

"I'll time it to go off when one of their trucks is passing. You signal me and I'll set it off with a gunshot. Happy?"

Arthur glared at his shadowy, disappearing form and said under his breath, "You'll be the one firing at military grade explosives from close range in a confined space."

"Well you can't expect to keep all the glamour jobs to yourself," Eames chided him, emerging from the qanat himself. The torchlight picked up his dirt-smeared forearms and shoulders, and the fresh tear in his shirt sleeve that revealed a white swell of shoulder muscle. Arthur speculated idly on what the exact dimensions of that massive bicep might be, if Eames would allow someone to run a tape measure all the way around it, flexing or– 

"How wide is the gap?" Arthur asked quickly.

With a bright-eyed look, Eames turned him side-on and flattened his palms over the front and back of Arthur's rib-cage as if gauging the width. "I'd say you could get through it. If you don’t mind losing a little skin."

"All right." Arthur picked up the pack Flynn had discarded. "Don't for god's sake let him bring his toys in here until we're out."

Risky, he thought a little later as he wriggled past the collapsed section of tunnel wall by the light of Nasrin's torch up ahead of him, to leave it at that. Risky to rely on the assumption that Eames could hold back Flynn's commando instincts, or would even attempt it.

They followed the qanat down to its end point beneath the barracks, then crept up a narrow, crumbling staircase that gave them a view of the big yard that fronted the complex, and the inside of the gate.

"Half past exactly," Nasrin whispered a good while later. "Right on time." The guard in the western sentry post was climbing down from his tower, exactly when they'd expected. He rested his rifle against the wall, checked his watch and pulled out a small thermos tucked into his jacket. 

"Status report," demanded Flynn in his earpiece, sounding as he always did as if he hoped the response might contain the words "attack", or "disaster", or at least "help". 

"In position. All quiet. Stay where you are." 

"There," Nasrin breathed into his other ear, pointing across the loose gravel road in front of them to the thick iron disc that covered an access hole embedded in a concrete platform. "Service entrance."

The main bunker entrance, they knew from Nasrin's sources in the dissident scientific community, ran out of the basement of the barracks building beside the admin complex, and was guarded by six soldiers at all times. But even in the faint light, the prints and tracks in the earth around the cover made it obvious that this second entrance was also used to occasional traffic.

The guard put away his thermos and made for the fluorescent light outside the main compound. They watched his path, looking for poorly lit nooks where they could lie in wait for him, syringe ready, on another night.

And then something happened that they had never hoped for. The second guard from the eastern sentry post also climbed down from his tower and made for the barracks at an urgent jog. There was no knowing how much longer they had before the next shift came out. 

"Take this." Arthur felt around in Flynn's pack for a spare gun and passed the rest to Nasrin.

"Be back here in an hour. Or you'll have to find your own way out."

With a nod, Arthur was scurrying over the road, dislodging the cover of the service entrance and scrambling onto the worn metal rungs of the ladder inside. 

"What are you doing?" came Flynn's outraged voice. "Pull back, solider. Pull back!" 

Arthur had an undergraduate science degree, a sporadically attended Wednesday night kickboxing class, and what felt like a lifetime of doing this kind of shit in dreams. He lowered the inch-thick iron cover until the indignant commands turned into static. Then he put his earpiece in his pocket and began the long descent. 

**

He should have been shocked at the depths to which a desperate regime could sink when its view of Western culture was filtered through the lens of fist-thumping presidential press conferences, internet pornography, and Bond films. But all he could think was Flynn. John Fucking Flynn, with his uncanny ability to make high drama and mortal peril drift into his waiting hands like snowflakes – when Flynn found out about this, he was going to think all his D-Days had come at once.

**

Back at ground level, two minor setbacks confronted him. Dawn had recently broken, throwing a hazy light over his escape route, and the road was crawling with incoming troops. The interval between two passing platoons gave him just enough time to slip out of the access shaft and into the shelter of the mechanical workshop behind it, from where he climbed up into the steel rafters which suspended the pulleys and winches they used to disassemble heavy vehicles for repair. 

By some stroke of luck, Eames rather than Flynn was at the other end when he reactivated his comms system. 

"Oh, welcome back," Eames said airily in his best garden party accent. "Did you find anything interesting down there while you were burning our beautifully thought-out plan into ashes?" 

"Like you've never gone off plan before," Arthur snapped, although if he was really honest about it, that was the one thing Eames never did. He may spend half his professional life with his toes on the line, smirking as if itching to take that one step too far, but never once had Arthur seen him cross it. With grim determination, Eames would follow a plan through more deadly setbacks than practically anyone else Arthur had worked with, and ditched it only when it was beyond redemption. 

"Apology accepted," Eames said. "Stay out of sight. Your rescue party will be along shortly."

For a fraction of a second, those words were oddly comforting. "No! Eames – no way. I'll sit it out here, come back up the tunnel once it's dark. The workshop's low security—"

"A day, Arthur? A whole day with no water, no relief." 

"I'll manage. Don't let him mount a rescue. What's he planning? Choppers? Grenade launchers? A full blown missile—"

He gulped back his protest as the workshop door opened. A mechanic in army fatigues moved briskly over to the workbench directly under Arthur's hiding place to pluck a drill from its recharger. Arthur held himself still, barely daring to breathe. 

"All right then," said Eames softly in his ear in a voice that brought no comfort at all. "Whatever you say."

**

It was one thing to commit himself to twelve hours perched on a rafter, another thing altogether to endure it once the sun had risen high enough to strike the corrugated iron sheeting above him and heat up the roof space. It was like being in one of the stone ovens from the town bakeries that turned the flatbreads mottled brown. Working gingerly to avoid attracting the attention of the mechanics at work down below, he unzipped his jacket and double knotted it around his waist. Then there was nothing to do but sit and listen to the nerve-fraying sounds of grinders, hammers and electric screwdrivers and the background music of chanted verses, dour compared to the cheerful pop and electronica Nasrin's friends had played over his two days passing through Tehran. 

By the time his watch read ten, he was so parched he was seriously considering making a dash for one of the bottles of distilled water for the radiators the moment the coast was clear. 

A few minutes before eleven, a streak of light started to peek around the side of one of the panels at the opposite side of the roof. He recognised the sure grip of the fingers before the metal peeled back far enough to glimpse Eames's face. He locked eyes with Arthur and beckoned. 

Arthur inched, heart in mouth, all the way across the main girder, clinging with sweaty hands a few feet above the men working oblivious on the workshop floor. By the time he slithered out through the narrow gap onto the roof of the garage behind, he felt as spent as if he'd run all the way across the desert.

"No grenade launchers?" he asked bad-temperedly.

Eames's smile was flat and grim. "We're not done yet. Here, make it quick."

And then he handed over a bottle of the sweetest, purest, wettest water Arthur had ever tasted in his life. 

"How did you get in?" he frowned once he'd drained half and made himself stop.

Eames nodded to the rear of the complex, and the sixty-foot escarpment it backed onto, a thin buttress that flared out from the higher reaches of the mountains. Arthur read the label on the bottle to avoid rolling his eyes. Everything but the helicopter fleet.

"Where's Flynn?"

"Let's save the chat, hmm? When those clouds shift, I'd say we've got about twenty minutes of glare to make it out of sight."

Arthur followed him across the garage roof, along the top of the courtyard wall, and then up the side of the barracks to the drainage trench behind it. Eames in the full momentum of his military command persona was even more infuriating than his worst insubordination because, even though Arthur knew he was a con man to the marrow, it was impossible to quell the certainty that everything was going to be all right, now that Eames had it in hand. Jobs with Eames were always twice as hard, with the constant effort it took to stand by his own judgment and avoid slipping into complacency.

The sun burst out from behind the clouds with a near blinding glare, just as they paused at the lip of the forty-foot-wide downward void where the exhaust from the vast underground bunker was expelled. On the far side of the shaft, unguarded because no-one in their right mind would contemplate attempting to cross it, Arthur could just make out a tiny ledge. From maybe thirty feet below them came the rumble of the giant pumps and rotors that orchestrated the removal of hundreds of tons of stale air and fumes every hour. A man would be mincemeat in a second, if the fall weren't enough to kill him on impact. Arthur scanned the vertical rock on one side and the blank rear wall of the barracks building on the other, in search of an alternative.

"Plenty of hand-holds," Eames said, grasping the very edge of the shaft to swing down into it without hesitation. A couple of pebbles dislodged by his feet disappeared with a clang like a rifle shot as the rotor blades finished them off. "And these old scaffolding bolts will take a bit of weight if you're careful."

Arthur's fingers were cramped, sweaty and scraped raw by the time Eames took hold of them to haul him out on the opposite side. Then there was the three-storey rope climb that left his arms trembling by the time he dragged himself onto the top of the spur and looked down upon the hundred-foot escarpment on the other side. 

"You're kidding me."

A spot of impromptu abseiling was all well and good for the kind of guy like Eames whose idea of leisure time was one-armed chin ups and a cocktail of anabolic steroids.

"Do forgive me, Arthur," Eames said with the first hint of irritation as he hauled up the rope. "I must have misheard. You seemed to be quite clear on the need to keep our entry and exit quiet."

Before he could hit on the right breezy reply, Eames had looped the rope around his waist, tied it and lowered him into the long descent. 

"Hey," he tried a little later, finally down on the ground, as Eames busied himself with concealing the rope as best he could among natural folds in the rock, in case they might need the entry point another time. "I get it. This wasn't in the job description. "

"Marvellous," Eames replied as he set off across the face of the slope, powering up towards the crest of the next ridge so that Arthur had to work to keep up. 

"Hey! Look, I know there's no reason you need to do this. Eames! I'm saying—"

Breaking over the top of the rise, Eames had stopped still. "Well la-de-dah. Who's the keenest point man in the business then?"

In the last patch of sunlight before the clouds rolled back over them, an early eighties era Soviet battle tank was approaching, its massive grey-green bulk travelling at full tilt around a distant spur of the mountains behind them.

"Nice work," Eames said when it intersected their path down on the flat, out of sight of the barracks. "Very nice. Just in time to give us a lift."

Looking unslept and unimpressed, Flynn shouted over the din of the engine, "Do you have any fucking idea how hard it is to get one of these bastards moving?"

Eames grinned. "I did tell you not to bother with back-up."

But when they'd slipped down through the hatch, Eames ran his hands fondly over the vintage controls, murmuring, "Another time, perhaps."

**

By lunch time, Flynn had taken insufferable to a whole new level.

"The hostages are the priority," he was insisting, with an urgency that had not diminished over the dozen or so times he'd repeated it. "We can't leave them down there."

Sipping her tea, Nasrin maintained her stance of unmoving opposition cloaked in her best impression of conciliation. "Of course, John. How could we leave them? But first you need to give me a plan that gets them out without endangering our goal."

"Risks are a given. The only question is whether we're big enough to put ourselves on the line and take them."

Blue eyes flashing, Flynn sounded like he had never in his life met a catastrophe he couldn't master. That was his gift: an effortless impression of charmed invincibility that was all too easy to fall for. But Arthur made his living in blurring the lines between impression and reality and he wasn't about to let himself be gulled. 

If Flynn's heroic instincts were inflamed by Arthur's heavily censored report of what he'd seen down in the bunker, god only knew what the whole truth would have done to him. All Flynn knew was that there were three hostages handcuffed in the storage room that held the warheads. Arthur had left out the detail that they were three young women – probably part of the missing Norwegian cycling party Arthur had skimmed a report of in his last check of local CIA intel. All of them not far off thirty: blonde, energetic and starting to shiver slightly in summer-weight burquas, and lightweight hiking trousers. The combination of tough, adventurous spirit overlaid with sudden helplessness had left even Arthur tempted to gamble on a reckless, improvised escape plan. It was bound to send a man like Flynn right off the scale.

The uncharacteristic ice in Eames's voice drew him back.

"Forget it," Eames was saying as he packed up his scant papers, photos and schematics with finality. "I signed on for an extraction, not an armed rescue, and that's not about to change."

Flynn kept his brooding gaze on the tabletop, doing a grand impression of a man bearing the weight of the world, or at least a small city, on his shoulders. "The game changed when Arthur got a look inside the bunker. We don't have to waste time on extraction now. We know exactly where the warheads are."

In one presumptive flourish, he'd apparently written Arthur's role right out of the job. "Like hell we don't!"

"Don't fret, Arthur. We still need someone to keep the tank warm while Eames and I go in."

Eames replied with a snort. "Sorry mate, still no sale."

With a dark smile, Flynn pulled a grenade out of his pocket, and tossed it as casually as an apple. "My pitch isn't done yet. Come on. I've heard the stories about that raid in Benghazi. Don't tell me it was a one-off."

The hungry, faintly erotic smirk taking shape on Eames's mouth was about to send Arthur right over the edge when Nasrin broke in matter-of-factly, "Sadly, John, we don't have a hang glider, a grenade launcher or a squad of highly trained ex-special forces commandos equipped with cutting edge amphibious attack technology. What we do have is some of the smartest dream thieves money can buy."

She gave a fatigued sigh when she picked up her tea cup to find it empty. "The value of our information goes up if we can be sure we know all of the locations the warheads are held in. That means extraction. Let's use the assets we've got."

Rubbing her right temple delicately, as if to soothe long-standing pain, she glanced up through her eyelashes in what Arthur thought was the most thinly veiled con of the year, and what to Flynn was apparently as irresistible as a strand of wool to a kitten.

"You need to keep yourself hydrated," Flynn pronounced, a touch of something gentler colouring his stern authority, and left to fetch her another bottle of water, probably hoping he'd have to cross at least one highly armed military checkpoint to get it.

"Why do you play up to him like that?" Arthur asked later, one professional to another, when he was helping her put together a light mix for a quick single-level extraction. 

She gave him a considering look. "Motivation is important to a man like Flynn."

"If this was my team, he'd have to motivate himself or get the hell out. We're on a job here. No-one's got time to waste on his hero complex."

There was a pause as she extracted a precise quantity of sedative solution from its bottle with a finely calibrated syringe. 

"Well then," she said distractedly as she released the liquid drop by drop into the mix. "It's a good thing this isn't your job, since all your management theory seems to have accomplished is to whip them both up to fight over you."

He very nearly dropped the flask. "Eames refuses to take me seriously, and as for Flynn, he's not even–"

"He's not what, Arthur? Competitive? Helplessly alpha? A winner at all costs?"

“He wouldn’t even know what to do with me.”

“Competition isn’t always about the prize on offer.”

He kept up the familiar action, swirling the flask until the mix was stable. "So what? They both get a kick out of showing me up. They're black ops. They love to give the finger to any civilian who tries to keep them in line. It's their thing." 

"All the same," she insisted, packing her gear away neatly. "I'd appreciate it if you made an effort not to inflame the situation."

"There's nothing to – Jesus, why don't I go get them and you can ask them straight out if I've provoked them into some sort high-stakes mating duel? For god's sake, I'm not the one who needs managing here."

Ignoring his outburst, she tipped the contents of the flask into a detachable pyrex receptor and slotted it in place in the PASIV.

"If you say so," she said. "Now, that storage room with the missiles – John wants to set the corridor on fire to make a smoke screen and manage the rest by brute force. The two cameras will have to be fed back to the admin block by wire, with all that rock around, but the security doors are probably on a local system. Is there a more elegant way to do it?"

She nudged her sketch plans towards him. He gave her an accusing sidelong glare, but got to work on it anyway.

**

For a blissful - brief - period on the climb down the ladder into the chilly depths of the bunker, Flynn and Eames were exactly as Arthur preferred them: silent, swift moving, intent, and oozing highly trained professional menace. He could almost let himself believe it was going to be one of those dream jobs when every well-drilled step followed the next like a brilliant football play: bypass the security feed from the corridor cameras, disable the security door on the storage room, photograph the missiles, affix trackers to a few of the warheads, and extract the location of any more missile caches from the hapless technician who came down to fix the door. 

"Looking fine," he told Nasrin through the comm as the line faded out into nothing. 

It was too good to last.

Arthur was stretched up on his tiptoes, steadying himself against the bare rock corridor wall in the white light of Eames's torch and delicately shearing off the plastic housing for the camera line to get to the wire underneath, when Flynn came back to them at a jog.

"No time for that," Flynn insisted. "We've got company. Have to do it the old fashioned way."

"Old fashioned" sounded like yet another one of Flynn's euphemisms for excessive use of force. Sure enough, he drew a thick blade from a pocket on his trousers, cut the cable with one flick of his wrist and jogged off down the corridor, vanishing into the gloom between the evenly spaced lights. 

"I'd have done it in ten motherfucking seconds," Arthur was muttering when he heard the rhythm of boots up above, carrying down the long slope from the admin block which they'd bypassed via the service shaft. In a couple of minutes they were going to have unwelcome company – maybe longer if the echoes down the corridor proved deceptive. 

Flynn was point man, Arthur reminded himself sternly as they caught up with him at the steep switchback corner of the corridor just before the storage room that housed the missiles. That meant he was entitled to make calls in a crisis situation, as he'd just done, and have his team back him up.

Flynn was a point man, Arthur revised shortly afterwards, who deserved to be punched in the mouth, except that he'd probably enjoy it.

"Did you actually think," Arthur hissed, "you could cut the camera feed without anybody noticing?"

A few metres around the corner, two newly positioned guards were standing on either side of the missile room, talking to each other in excitable, urgent tones. Unlike the trained, battle-wise soldiers who manned the ground level barracks, the only staff trusted down here, so near to their covert nuclear technology, were Revolutionary Guard, appointed first and foremost for their fanatical dedication to duty.

Finding two of them stationed outside the missile room made the next step in their plan not just tricky but physically impossible. The mission goal of getting in and out unobserved was going to be somewhat compromised if they had to leave a trail of destruction behind them. 

Flynn mouthed something that looked like "old fashioned way" and, throwing back the hood of his jacket, strode around the bend of the corridor, into view of the guards. 

"Say your prayers, gentlemen," Flynn advised them loudly. "In seven minutes and thirty nine seconds, the bomb I just planted outside the reactor core is going to go off and wipe you and your project from the face of the earth."

Despite the lack of common vocabulary, Flynn was speaking the language of bravado and bluster. They understood him well enough. Their burst of agitated shouting had a clear meaning: get on your knees. The next sound was the thump of a rifle butt striking flesh. There was another burst of shouting and then what might have been the impact of a boot. Flynn let out a short, disciplined grunt. Holding his breath, Arthur peered around the corner just in time to see Flynn surge to his feet and stagger down the corridor, only to collapse again on the other side of the storage room doorway just as a bullet pierced the air above him. 

"Let's go then," Eames grinned. God damn him, he looked wryly amused and ready for action. There was none of the pissy bad temper he'd put on while barging in, completely unasked, to spring Arthur from the workshop the other day.

They hurried down the corridor, pulling up outside the storage room to slot the dummy card into the sensor, hooking it into the battery in Arthur's backpack and shorting it out in a quiet, dying zap. The heavy steel door was another matter, quite impossible to open quietly. Eames wrapped both hands around the bar of the handle and tested its resistance. 

Flynn, spitting blood onto the dirt floor, managed to drag himself up onto his knees, leading the guards a little further away from the break-and-enter behind him.

"Do your—" He grimaced defiantly as another boot slammed into his ribs. "Do your worst, you mad fuckers."

They did. 

When the next kick connected with his side, Flynn let out a roar with the full volume of his lungs that covered the clang of the handle sliding up and the bulky door falling back beneath Eames's shoulder. As Arthur taped the shorn-off strip of steel scrubbing wool to the underside of the door handle and shoved it closed, Flynn was making a valiant break down the corridor, stumbling into an unlit side chamber like a man on his last reserves of resistance, just slow enough to let them catch him without bullets, and yelling as he went. 

The hostages were still in the same place, cuffed at ground level on the other side of the eight-foot-high shelving that held the missiles. Arthur led Eames out of sight – the less the hostages knew, the better – and reached into his satchel for the tracking devices he'd spent yesterday morning painting to match the dark grey casing of the weapons.

"Anything I can do to get our mark in here faster?" Eames asked, close to his ear to prevent any trace of their accents from reaching the hostages. "Sooner or later they'll have to take our point man down to base command, and then we're sprung." 

Arthur let his breath out as the magnetised disc latched on to the missile tail and held. Speaking for himself, he thought it would take a pretty long time to get sick of punching John Flynn in the face. The arrogant flash of his ice-blue eyes, cutting through the carefully styled humility, was a provocation he couldn't – or refused to – switch off. 

"Leave it. The tech will be stationed somewhere down here so he can get to the reactor shields in an em—" He dropped his voice to a breath as the door handle started to lift. "—ergency."

Slipping between the two rows of shelving, they watched it unfold like a well-directed piece of theatre. As the technician – a young, bearded man with wire-rimmed glasses wearing the khaki uniform of the Revolutionary Guard – came in, he was already pressing his fingers into his shirt to blot up the pinpricks of blood from the anaesthetic-drenched cut points of the steel scrubbing wool on the door handle. He had barely got his screwdriver into the fastenings on the inside security pad when he started to slump against the wall, then went down on his knees.

Less than twenty seconds after that, the needle was in his arm and Arthur was pushing down the release button on the PASIV.

The single dream level was a command centre in a bunker similar, but not too similar, to this one. The walls were lined with data screens and secure steel cabinets. When their technician came in from the maze of corridors outside, Eames was ready to greet him with the face of a Quds Corps brigadier who'd been cocky enough to give an interview to the BBC, making it a matter of a click or two on You Tube to download his mannerisms and voice. Arthur, dressed in the nondescript robes of a scholar who might by implication be an ambitious young player on the fringes of the Guardian Council, only needed to lurk in the background for now.

"Quickly now, soldier," Eames urgently recited the Farsi script Nasrin had drilled them in. "The American forces will be here in an hour. They want our missiles. Everything is lost, unless you can keep them out."

On the table was the most accurate plan of the bunker Arthur had been able to dream up. The technician's focus was where they needed it to be as he bent over the map, eyes darting from place to place, planning. On his face was the resolve of a keen young man thrust, at last, into the coveted role of hero.

After that, it was only a matter of checking through the cabinets until the technician's sub-conscious materialised the data they needed. Arthur picked up the freshly formed paper and folded it over itself. Two sites were marked in red: the storage room they knew about, and a second room, deep down in the bunker. 

Clean, quiet, elegant and precise, just like the best extractions Arthur had pulled off, when he could prevent the likes of Flynn complicating things with needless heroics. With one last glance to commit the whole of the plan to memory, he drew out his gun.

As Eames came round, Arthur had already returned from secreting one last tracker in the pocket of the nearest hostage.

"All good?" Eames murmured, blinking away the last of the dream as he pushed himself up from where he'd been sleeping against the missile stack.

The nice thing about Eames was that, when the job really called for focus, he became a man of very few words. Arthur nodded once as he retrieved the bottle of contraband alcohol – a foul blend fermented from whatever could be thrown into an improvised, illegal underground still – and splashed a little around the technician's sleeping mouth and shirt collar, to dissuade him from running off to high command if he woke up suspicious about his blackout. Everyone knew the punishment served up to drinkers, and for the Revolution's own foot-soldiers there would be no mercy. 

Outside, the corridor was empty – the squad they heard descending must have passed them by or turned back. Arthur drew out the anaesthetic syringe they'd brought for backup on the technician. Eames nodded silently at it, understanding. There was enough for both guards – just.

They found Flynn in the side chamber he'd fled into, tensed into a fighting stance among the broken buggy wheels, shovels and picks. He'd taken a lot of punishment while they'd been away. The pale wash of light from the single portable fluorescent lamp in the corner caught the trails of dried, dark blood standing out from the otherwise glistening skin of his bare chest. 

"Again," Flynn said hoarsely, holding himself still and tense as a spring. 

The taller of the two guards moved forward, stripped off his jacket, fists raised, blood on his knuckles. Only Flynn could provoke well-drilled guards into turning an interrogation into a sparring match. Something about him just begged, across the language barrier, to be shut the fuck up.

Arthur felt a pang of pity for the other guard as he thrashed in the grip of Eames's arms while Arthur jabbed the needle into him. Eames's hand covered not only his mouth but a good part of his face as well. His colleague didn't even have a chance to struggle. Reeling from Flynn's uppercut, the syringe was in his neck before he knew it. 

"Let's go," Arthur said, sprinkling them with the rest of the alcohol bottle. "They won't be out long."

Flynn nodded, eyes flashing, took two steps, and promptly fell to his knees.

Ten minutes of solid beating, Arthur thought as he crouched to catch him before he could fall further. God knew what vital organs he'd taken hits to.

"Eames."

"I've got it."

As simple as that, it was taken care of. Bearing Flynn's not inconsiderable weight, Eames stood up and Flynn stood with him, jaw set against the pain as he rose. 

"Get him back up the ladder as quick as you can. The dawn shift will be coming in soon."

Eames's expression turned dark. "Where will you be?"

"There's another cache of missiles. I've got two trackers left. Keep him out of sight."

And out of trouble, Arthur thought as he swiped the guard's jacket and cap and hurried off down the corridor, heading deeper. Flynn was already trying to prise himself out of Eames's grip, protesting gruffly.

"Arthur—" 

The growl of frustration in Eames's voice was gratifying – fair recompense for all the stress he'd caused Arthur on plan after hotly disputed plan. Eames called his name again, softer, but angry this time, making it clear that, if not for the wounded man struggling dizzily against his grasp, he'd be standing in Arthur's way. 

Eames's objections were barely out of earshot when the misgivings started to hit him. At first, his only company in the corridor was the soft grind of his footsteps on the dirt floor. The solid rock seemed to press in on him as he descended. Here, down below the access shaft, there was only one way in, and one way out, and he had to remind himself that no matter how desperate he got, there would be no dreaming up an extra escape route mid-operation. He was out of his depth. He allowed himself that single, rational thought, and then he put it aside, to concentrate on surviving. 

Confidence was everything, he said to himself, walking faster through the patches of light with his head low. He'd learned that from Cobb's best moments, and from the unflappable nonchalance Eames brought to every job they did. If he didn't question himself, no-one would give him a second glance. And yet the further underground he went, the harder it became to keep going. He passed a command post where the two guards looked up from their heated argument and, after a heart-stopping pause, let him go by. He missed the solid bulk of Eames walking a step behind, following his lead. He missed having a smart pair of eyes to quietly catch anything that escaped him. 

He narrowed his focus down to a set of mental crosshairs, trained on each task in turn. Everything else ceased to exist as he checked them off one by one, dimensions receding to a blur on either side of his goal. Follow the map in his memory to the second storage room. Short out the door. Photograph the second missile cache. Place the trackers. Then, between one moment and the next, he was climbing back up the slope, errand completed. 

But when he reached the surface, a truck had pulled up over the access hole. He looked up at the mechanics of its undercarriage, which radiated faint heat and dust from the journey. Half a dozen soldiers were unloading its cargo. Their legs cast menacing, purposeful shadows on the floodlit ground.


	2. Chapter 2

There was nothing else for it, in the end. As he watched the boxes and pipes that came out of the truck being piled up by the nearest wall, he had the sinking realisation that they were destined to be lowered down the very service shaft he was concealed in, as soon as the truck moved out of the way. Going back down was too dangerous – although he'd roughened up the wire Flynn had cut so that it might pass for the result of natural rockfall and erased all other traces of their presence, there were two guards and a technician down there with unexplained fainting fits to be suspicious about. 

So when the empty truck rolled away, Arthur was hooked underneath it, bones straining out along the back of his hands as he gripped onto the rear axle with his ankles hooked over the drive shaft.

He was barely a hundred feet out the gate of the compound when he realised he'd underestimated the muscle strength this was going to take. It was fifteen miles, or thereabouts, on the road back towards Yazd before the first crossroads where they might stop long enough for him to get free, and after that another forty before the mountain road where the sharp corners might slow them down a little. Flynn's imaginary voice in his ear said "Reminds me of the time I hitched all the way to Pyongyang hanging on to the feet of a Russian helicopter – a piece of piss, except for the four broken fingers and the punctured lung". 

Outside the artificial light of the compound, the night was dissolving into a grey dawn. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut and pictured his papers laid out along the wall at the bakery and the sequential list of tasks he needed to check off before the next step in their plan, shutting out the ache that made his arms tremble. If he let go at full tilt on the open road, best case was a broken shoulder or hip while the pitted tarmac shredded his back like a cheese grater; worst case was being crushed under the wheels if he bounced at an unlucky angle. 

That had to be a mile at least, by now. He breathed deep and clung with all his might. If he was going to die under the wheels of a truck on some remote Iranian highway, he'd fight to the last joule of energy in his body before he let it happen. His left wrist trembled. His fingertips started slowly, inexorably, to slip.

The horn sounded as the truck braked sharply. An urgent bleating started up from somewhere nearby – goats, he saw as he turned his head, dozens of spindly legs skittered around the right side of the truck, and in front of it. The vehicle had slowed to a crawl as the obstinate animals parted around it. He eased his right hand and foot down first, testing the impact of the slow-moving road surface, then detached himself completely. 

"All in one piece?" asked Eames from somewhere behind the flock, as the truck receded into the distance.

Arthur just rested his head on the road and looked up into the faint grey-blue of the sky, thinking how he'd been one unlucky twist away from death far too many times tonight, and how it had left him feeling drained and disappointed in himself, with none of the adrenalin high that men like Flynn and Eames seemed to get from it. 

"Arthur?" Eames repeated urgently, crouching down beside him.

"Yes," Arthur replied without shifting his gaze. "No injuries."

The goats' bells jangled a little way off. There was a sliver of moon in the sky, like half a question mark. The road was nice and solid underneath him, and he was glad to be alive, gladder than he'd been for a while. 

"Well," Eames said quietly. "That's a lucky thing."

When he opened his eyes, Eames was already on his feet, hand outstretched as if Arthur might not be able to stand up on his own. 

"Come on," Eames prompted. "The least you can do is help me wrangle the goats."

**

By the time they'd coaxed sixteen contrary animals back towards the farmhouse Eames had borrowed them from, the white-out of adrenalin had worn off. Arthur's temper was spiralling down towards a new low point. He was supposed to be the one everyone relied on – the one who set the diligent standards the rest of the team lived up to (or didn't). And yet all this extra work, all these unnecessary risks, had come from his own reckless choices.

What stung worse than anything was that he knew exactly where this uncharacteristic behaviour had come from. Arthur of all people should know better than to fall under the gung-ho influence of a man like John Flynn. 

But Eames – he had to grit his teeth even to let himself think it – Eames was not to blame, for once. He let Eames's natural languor drop them back from the furious pace he'd been setting as they cut across a pistachio orchard back towards the town. 

"Good work back there," he ventured. 

It was an olive branch that hurt to hold out. So it pretty much floored him when the response he got was icy indignation.

"It's an honour and a privilege, Arthur, to bear witness to your unexpected powers of improvisation. God forbid I should have put you to the trouble of any sort of prior consultation."

Arthur bit his tongue, since Eames clearly wasn't done. "Your fulsome praise is a little misdirected, however. Nasrin was the one who thought of the goats. I was merely the humble instrument of her inspiration. The muscle of course. As always."

For years they'd been hitting these moments, where Arthur could sense he'd kicked against some delicate part of Eames's ego, without having the faintest clue how he'd done it. It pissed him the hell off. Usually he snapped back a reminder that Eames wasn't the only one on the team with pride in his work. But today he'd lost that right, so he walked on in silence, swallowing back the defensive retorts. 

Eames vaulted over the fence at the edge of the orchard, launching himself up on one meaty arm.

"Not the goats," Arthur finally trusted himself to say as he focused on finding a toehold and steeling his exhausted thighs to lever him up. "I meant with Flynn. Down there. He was pretty badly—" 

On top of the fence, his elbow and knee wavered abruptly, making him cling to the weather-worn wood and stop still. He balanced there, paralysed, because if he moved forward or back, his legs were going to give out and he would fall. 

"Ah, I see." 

There was a firm hand under his armpit all of a sudden, easing him down. He could smell the exertion on Eames, this close. Though he'd swapped his blood-stained jacket for a new one, he clearly hadn't had time to get under the shower.

"The great John Flynn. He casts his spell over everyone in the end. Practically famous for it," Eames concluded, releasing his grip. "Understood."

Eames was a spiteful fucker. A mouthy, insubordinate, sometimes brilliant, spiteful fucker with a profound knack for getting right under Arthur's skin in the most tender places possible. It wasn't as if Arthur needed to be told what went wrong. His heart was still reminding him with each shaky beat how far he had just exceeded his usual topside role. And he knew exactly whose overblown sense of bravado had provoked him like a thirteen-year-old into doing it.

"All right, Eames," he said wearily, pushing ahead to walk the last few hundred feet alone. "Jesus."

**

Arthur had taken a few fists to the face in his time. They inevitably left him looking lop-sided, the flesh all swollen up and shiny over the injury site, and scrunched up everywhere else, his skin an awful blotchy yellow for days. Flynn looked dashingly ruffled up, a deep patch of purple over his right eyebrow, all over his left cheek, and a jagged, unstitched tear in the skin right over the cheekbone, as if he'd applied it there himself with the tip of his combat knife in some bizarre macho equivalent of rouge.

"Welcome back," Flynn said, not sounding all that sincere. "It looked pretty bad back there, two tonnes of delivery truck parked right over your exit."

His upper half was naked, apart from a line of fresh white elastic bandage cinched over what looked like some cracked or badly bruised ribs. With a somewhat sulky air, he replaced a cache of grenades in his kit bag, as if he'd been looking forward to the pain and challenge of going back into the bunker, wounds and all, to get Arthur out.

No matter what, Arthur was going to keep it businesslike.

"How long before you'll be back in the field?"

Flynn shrugged, "As soon as the ground work for phase two is in place." He gestured towards his bandages. "This is just a bit of surface damage. Not the worst I've seen, far from it."

He was looking at some point behind Arthur's shoulder, somewhere vastly different in time and place. His eyes spoke of pain that had tested him to the marrow, well beyond what he'd thought his limits were. It was about this point that Arthur usually wrote him off as a self-glorifying jerk and gave him a req list to check or a blade to sharpen. This morning, he was tired, with his temper badly frayed already.

"Yeah, I heard it's tough at MI5," Arthur replied. "Dim lighting and no ergonomic chairs to speak of."

From far away, Flynn said softly, "There's no hell on earth quite like the inside of a Russian prison." 

There was, after all, that eight year absence which none of Arthur's background checks had ever been able to fill in. This was the closest he'd come to an answer. And the contrast of the clinical white bandage made the texture of Flynn's muscled torso look warm and alive. He was suddenly, despite himself, interested. 

"How long?" he asked, keeping it as light as he could.

But Flynn's black reverie had reached an abrupt end. For a man like him, introspection was not an unduly lengthy process.

"I got onto a contact in the CIA," he reported, switching back to his old urgency. "Upshot is, the only thing holding them up is extracting the right fissile material. They're closer than we thought. And as soon as they get that ..."

He left the possibility hanging, putting an extra dash of crisis in his tone, as if it might push Arthur into accepting an unpalatable proposition.

"You want to bring forward the hostage evac, do you?"

"Tonight," Flynn said, his mouth grim. "Get some rest. We debrief this afternoon."

With a shrug, Arthur decided to let him keep his misconceptions for now. 

"And Arthur," Flynn said, drawing him back from his departure. "I've seen men thrown up against the wall and shot for lesser insubordinations than the one you pulled down there."

"A good thing we're in a civilised professional business then, isn't it?"

For an instant, Flynn's scrutiny turned absent-minded, as if picturing himself in an uncivilised business, leading a suicide mission on the wrong side of the Western Front, or wiping out a rival Yakuza clan, body by bullet-razed body, or halting a battleship with his bare hands.

"Don't go running off again," he scowled at last, sitting back down on his bed. "Nasrin paid for our best work and she's going to get it."

**

Arthur picked up a sketch pad and went straight out into the early morning solace of the courtyard to jot down as much as he could remember of the route to the second cache of missiles and all the details that had snagged in his mind during the journey. The last thing he intended to do was get some rest. If Flynn was carrying right on, injuries and all, Arthur sure as hell wasn't crawling into bed like a freshman just come home from a party.

The surface of the ornamental pool looked like solid glass in the slanted light, deep purple-blue and perfectly still, reflecting the pomegranate blossoms like shadowy little comets. In the tranquil courtyard, the night's precarious mission seemed distantly fanciful. He had to work hard to recall the details. Sitting on the edge of the brickwork, he had sketched out most of the missile room and added in a box on a stalk filled with details of the hostages' bindings and physical condition when his memory started to become uncooperative. Had it been twenty feet or fifty down the corridor before the side chamber where Flynn had got his beating? The dimensions were getting elastic in his mind, elusive—

"Need a pillow there?"

Arthur jerked his head up from where it had been drifting slightly towards his half-finished map, his mind just on the blurry precipice of sleep.

"I'm fine," he snapped, hearing the drowsy slur in his voice. 

"Never doubted it."

Lowering himself on one knee, Eames cracked the top of a local brand cola can, tipped a little on the ground and topped it up from a flask in his pocket. 

"Keep your strength up," he said as he swirled the drink for a smoother mix. "The adrenalin high will only keep you going so long. You want to be in one piece when you come down off it."

The can was wonderfully cold as Arthur took it. "I appreciate it." The act of speaking made his tongue feel unwieldy in his mouth. "But I said I'm all right."

Nonetheless, Eames waited to make sure he took his medicine, uncomfortably close on his knee between Arthur's feet, eyes downcast. He was oddly nervy, shaken out of his habitual arsey nonchalance. It wasn't like Eames at all to be thrown by a glitch in the plan: it was with his back to an unexpected wall that he ad libbed to his peerless best. The alcohol slid hotly into Arthur's stomach, kicking his muscles looser with an instant effect that reminded him how many hours it was since he'd eaten or drunk. He put down the sketch pad and took a longer drink from the can.

Eames frowned at the blood – mostly Flynn's – on his jacket. "Take that off, will you."

Arthur let him jerk down the zip and hold the can while he wrestled it off, thinking how Flynn was two rooms away with a cracked rib and a set of bruises he was going to be wearing like a shirt tomorrow. 

"I'm all right, Eames," he said a little tersely.

It was only once Eames had moved away that he could feel the crackling potential in his nearness, the sense of anticipation, of a moment missed. Eames stood by the back wall, weight shifting from foot to foot, still wound up. There was plenty of prep work to occupy his time if he didn't need the sleep, and absolutely nothing to require his presence out here. Eames's professional trademark was detachment; he held himself aloof even for a forger. Arthur had never known him to fret about a team member like this before. 

He finished the can in a few gulps and put it down. 

"I knocked my shoulder pretty bad when I dropped off the truck," he ventured. Eames looked up, quick and cautious. "Would you check it for me?"

Eames tilted his head uncertainly and wiped his hands on his thighs. Arthur's thoughts dwelt on the potential in them, the girth of fingers and palm, as he crossed the distance between them and turned his back. 

"About there." He raised his left arm and rolled his shoulder in the joint to demonstrate where the faint ache was making itself felt.

For a moment he thought that Eames was going to snub him completely. Then both warm hands opened up and latched onto him, palms digging in hard either side of the spine as the tips of his fingers weighed down Arthur's shoulders. Then the contact shifted outwards, never losing strength, until the heels of Eames’s hands had lodged right behind the ball of his shoulder, fingers wrapped around Arthur’s upper arm. With one slow push, he bent all the over-worked tendons and muscles across Arthur’s upper back like a plastic ruler, right to their limits. Arthur might have sighed if he’d had any breath to do it with. 

The strain was delicious on his stiff muscles, pushing just far enough into pain, just as much as he could take. Eames was breathing slowly behind him, no trace of physical exertion apparent as he bent Arthur about. Arthur had seen him bust down a door with his shoulder in a dream, but that meant next to nothing in reality with a man like Eames, who was so careful about the impression he chose to give. The pressure eased up a bit. 

"Does that hurt?"

"Not so much," Arthur told him a bit shakily. "Don't be afraid to dig a bit."

Eames’s attention slid down to cup his biceps, squeezing in and up, in and up, easing the muscle and tendons loose, before returning to fan out over his shoulders again. His eyes fluttered closed. It had been too long since he'd had another man's hands on him. It was the sort of thing that had just kind of slipped his mind in a busy year, like paying the power bills on his rarely visited flat, or getting his hair cut. It was only now that his body, crying out for more, rebuked him for having neglected it so badly.

"Let's look at this shoulder then." Eames sounded distracted, delightfully off his game.

He slid his hand under Arthur's arm, taking a gentle grip and lifting it onto the horizontal. Even through his shirt, the flesh tingled with unaccustomed contact. He swallowed hard as Eames pressed the bony edge of his thumb knuckle right under the shoulder blade and followed the line of it across and up. The strained ligaments tensed up in resistance, but there was a pleasant warmth when they relaxed.

"Do that again."

Eames did, putting more strength into it, then he shifted to work on both shoulder blades at once, searching out the stiffness behind and below them and mercilessly crushing it away. He was good – Arthur should have expected that. He paid attention when Arthur pressed back into a touch or shifted away from a painful spot. His hands coaxed and brutalised as if he had a direct line of communication to Arthur's nerves, bypassing his conscious will completely. 

"Does your neck hurt?"

"A little," Arthur replied quickly.

The erotic connection of bare flesh ran through him as Eames's big hand enclosed the right side of his neck while his thumb tripped over the vertebrae. He let his head tilt freely, focused on the persistent strength of Eames's hand, the fine trace of sweat starting to build up where their skin connected, and the rough, open-mouthed breaths he could hear behind him.

"Has that got it then?" Eames dragged both his hands down to flatten out over Arthur's back again, super-heated through the single layer between them, and paused. 

"Hard to tell with this in the way," Arthur replied, as if wholly committed to obtaining an accurate diagnosis. He untucked the front of his shirt and started on the bottom button. 

Eames's sigh slid warm over the back of his neck.

"Fooling around on a job is as stupid as it gets," Eames said, even as his hand slipped down onto Arthur's waist, venturing at last into firmly untherapeutic territory as he gripped hard over the hipbone.

"I can keep it together," Arthur promised. "Can you?"

The wet touch of Eames's mouth on his neck was a bit of a shock, a step in a dangerously compelling direction. There was a hot flicker of tongue. Then he closed his teeth sharply over the muscle, just the wrong side of playful.

"I'm not about to put the job at risk for the sake of a five minute rumble." His rebuke was somewhat undermined by his unthinking caress stroking up and down Arthur's flank. "A point man should have a better sense of priorities."

With that, he wrapped his hands back around Arthur's shoulders and pushed him an arm's length away.

"In less than twelve hours, we'll be performing a hostage evacuation from a highly guarded nuclear facility," he concluded, suddenly all business. "Go to bed. Sleep off this new cavalier attitude before it gets someone killed."

And a moment later, he was back in the house with the door shut emphatically behind him.

**

Arthur and his cavalier attitude were holding their own against Flynn at his most smoulderingly dramatic, that evening as the sun went down. Bare and glistening biceps tensed for imminent action, Flynn looked ready to overturn a table or at least punch a hole in a wall.

"You can live with their blood on your hands, can you?" he spat, black pupils in those icy blue eyes fixed on Arthur like hostile laser sights. "Civilians?"

Worn down from a painful day's research, resorting to staticky phone calls into incompatible timezones whenever their internet connection ground to a halt, Arthur couldn't reply with anything more heated than pragmatic repetition. "I told you it won't come to that. It's a two day trip into Azerbajan to pick up the parts I need. It sets us back less than a week."

Eames spoke up from where he was leaning in the corner, back up to his usual mercurial trouble-making after a couple of hours' afternoon sleep. "Two weeks in captivity and the psychological damage will already be done. If they're robust enough to have kept themselves intact this far, another few days won't leave any deeper scars." 

Flynn's hand clenched into a fist. Inspiration hit Arthur like a wave.

"What assets could we lay our hands on with four extra days?"

"Helicopters," Flynn answered automatically, as if he kept a mental map of available armaments in the vicinity at all times. "There were two at the old base where I found the tank, in pretty poor condition. I saw a half-empty box of smoke bombs. Grenade launchers in a stack of old parts." 

"We might stock up on some more explosives, then. If we're not fussy about a few rusty pins." Eames looked delighted, as if the job had finally caught his interest. 

Eames and Flynn shared a dark smile. "And I wouldn't say no to a sniper rifle in case we need it on the way in."

"You have forty-eight hours," Nasrin announced as she collected her papers and retreated to her room. "My contact in Esfahan can source the parts quicker. By the end of tomorrow, you'll have your device."

Arthur frowned. "One day is pretty slim for tailoring an EMP disruptor to fit in the tail of a missile." 

Nasrin only shrugged, "Her father managed an army munitions supply line out of Russia until the hardliners forced him out. If anyone can do it in a day, she can."

"Forty-eight hours is possible," Flynn said, his gaze frozen purposefully as his mind dreamed of large scale explosives. "Barely."

Flynn had his combat face on. Eames was half-heartedly concealing a smirk. Arthur decided that was a close to a win as he was going to get with a team like this.

**

He'd finally washed off the last night's sweat and dust, and some of his temper with it, by the time he was interrupted by a knock on the door of the old flour storage cellar he was using for a bedroom.

"You're taking care of that shoulder injury, I hope," Eames enquired through the door. "Don't do anything too athletic in there."

Arthur found a clean shirt and fastened a button to hold it in place over his towel. Nonetheless, Eames's gaze dipped down pointedly when he had closed the door behind him and descended the short staircase.

"Something I can do for you?"

Eames stepped into the room, giving it a potential purchaser's once-over. "Settle down. I'm only here with your interests at heart."

Arthur kicked his empty shoes into a neat parallel where he'd tossed them at the foot of the folded hessian sacks and sheets that served for his bed and refused to play along with whatever this visit was in aid of. He was too tired to tip-toe through the minefield of Eames's ego right now. Since whatever he said was bound to be the wrong thing, he held his tongue. 

"You did a bang-up job on our friend Flynn back there," Eames said at last. "Pushed all the right buttons."

"I'm aware," Arthur said curtly, resenting the undertone that patronised him for having finally caught up with what Eames had known all along. But he left it there. If he could stick to cool-headed strategy all evening in the face of Flynn's dramatic objections, he wasn't about to let Eames undo his calm now. 

"You were a delight to watch."

Arthur could only frown. The last-resort energy he'd been able to force out of his body was all wrung out now, and the fall of darkness had started to shut his system down like a timer. He was more than usually weary of Eames's needling, especially now that it was keeping him from sleep, and from finally dealing with the persistent, unsatisfied craving he'd been doing his best to ignore since the morning's incident in the courtyard. He wasn't even going to dress. As soon as the door shut behind Eames, he was going to put out the light and crawl into the lone folded sheet like it was a deluxe king sized model from the Four Seasons.

"You should let me have another look at you," Eames continued. "Now that the injury's had a chance to cool down." 

Arthur was too tired to tell the difference between Eames's subtle levels of sincerity and his perpetual teasing. He didn't know what he'd do in this condition with Eames's hands all over him again. 

"And then what?"

Eames looked away at last, at the blacked out window, at the floor. "That would be entirely up to you."

Despite everything, Arthur was curious. The sort of attraction Eames's hands had stirred up in him that morning wasn't the kind of thing that could be put easily back in a box. His blood was quickening.

"Me and my misplaced priorities?"

"Yes." Eames must have read the physical reaction behind the terse words, because he reached out confidently and hooked two fingers over the single fastened button holding Arthur's shirt together, and paused, the touch of his fingers spreading warmth like spilled syrup across Arthur's chest. 

"Me and my cavalier attitude?"

"As a matter of fact—" He flicked the button free, voice turning deep and slow. "— I'm hoping you've got a little of that left over."

And then he was shifting closer, bending slightly to kiss the side of Arthur's neck, fleeting dry lips and then the wet slide of his open mouth. He sucked gently, as lazily confident as ever, as if he knew he could take all the time he needed. 

Under its stupor of fatigue, Arthur's body was already saying an adamant yes, repeating it with every heavy beat of his pulse. The last two days had stuffed him with tension like a pistol full of gunpowder, and only the explosion of sex was going to release it. It wasn't just the anaesthetic pleasure of coming that he needed – he wanted the work-out of a good combative fuck, needed the adrenalin rush of wrestling and rolling and slicking himself in another man's sweat. He needed to lose track of the boundaries of himself for a while. He was going to say yes to anything Eames wanted until he got off, and then he was going to sleep like the dead.

"Watch that shoulder," Eames murmured, slipping a hand round onto Arthur's lower back to pull him closer.

And that one touch, weirdly, worked like a master key in a complicated lock. He grasped onto the back of Eames's shirt and let himself lean into that steady, keen strength, the animal heat of him. Just like that, all Arthur's tension-wracked muscles let themselves go. As if sensing the change, Eames's kisses worked their way up, nudging under his jaw, turning gentle, drawing shivers up his spine, and then there was warm breath against his cheek.

He jerked his chin and offered Eames the other side of his neck – they didn't have time for kissing and he needed something edgier than that, needed to get straight to the point. If that was something Eames wanted, the complacent son-of-a-bitch could damn well work for it. 

With an amused hum, Eames got back to work, a hungry scrape of teeth over the tendon, hand opening over Arthur's back like a powerful claw. Arthur arched into it, shifting his feet to get himself nicely wedged up around Eames's thigh, unable to hold his response back. Eames had a nimble sense of timing, knew just when to shift from playful to rough, just how to balance on the edge of uncertainty so that he never quite got comfortable with what might be coming next. 

The hot touch of Eames's hand sliding under his shirt kicked him up to a new level. How the hell weren't they skin-on-skin already? He shoved his way clear to shrug off his shirt and jerk the towel free. Since Eames had gone stock still, his contribution reduced to the hot weight of his gaze – as if the connection between sex and nakedness were somehow unexpected – Arthur took charge. When he wrapped his hands around Eames's lower ribs and squeezed hard against the thick muscle, he got a rough sounding sigh, so he slid his grip up under his shirt, following the lovely bulge of abs and the emphatic curve of those awesome pectorals. He still had his hand on one when he reached down, greedy, to test out the obvious ridge in Eames's pants. Harder than he'd expected, barely any give at all under his touch. Eames’s hips pressed instantly into the contact. Easy where Arthur had expected him to be contrary. Committed instead of aloof. 

Before he knew it, he had his mouth on Eames's neck, biting, squeezing everything he could reach, wrenching at the shirt until Eames finally caught on and slipped it off. All that naked muscle – Arthur's hands roamed fiercely as he mouthed Eames's chest, licking at the hair and salty skin. 

"That's it", Eames said, sounding distant and dazed.

He bit his way along Eames's jawline, pulled roughly on his earlobe, licked hungrily at the smooth skin behind the rough evening bristles. He listened for the catch of Eames's breath in his throat – bit again to produce another hitch. The head of his cock was rubbing against Eames's pocket, full mast and impatient –

Eames touched the back of his head tentatively. "Leave me something to hold my head on my shoulders, won't you?"

This was not how Arthur did things. Sure, he wasn't the passive type – any hook-up went better if he was clear about what he liked – but he wasn't an animal like this. Sex should be slow enough to feel the sensation, a back-and-forth shift of building pleasure. Not this brutal, desperate hurtle towards a climax that was going to slam over him like a truck. This was – this was four days of John fucking Flynn – four days of static electricity and all the friction of working with his ungovernable personality.

Pulling back, he ran his fingers over the wet, mottled skin of Eames's neck, over the bruised heat in the flesh. Before any sense of propriety could get in the way, he turned his attention back down to the now curved and uncomfortable-looking line of Eames's arousal, straining hard against the inside left pocket of his trousers. Eames shuddered beautifully when he stroked it, then held his breath as Arthur popped the button to make enough space to reach in and angle it into the gap between Eames's stomach and the zip, shoving his underwear out of the way. The peek of blood-darkened cockhead made his mouth water. But they were going to get there slowly. So he eased his thumb and forefinger into the gap and worked the foreskin back and forth. It was mesmerising, the soft, delicate skin, the vulnerability, the helplessly responsive twitch he got with each stroke. It was all a bit hard to believe on a man like Eames, who fastidiously clad every other surface of his body in hard muscle and studied nonchalance.

His ears were full of Eames's breath as they both watched him fill out that last fraction, watched the first glistening drops gather in the slit. Arthur worked it slowly until they spilled, until he had Eames jerking at the touch, desperate to turn that tiny point of contact into something more. Eames's open mouth looked plush and inviting. When Arthur's fingers slid in, he groaned around them. Then he reached the end of his patience and jerked his zip down, trying to shove more of his cock into Arthur's grasp. 

The hot heft of it made his stomach flutter. Arthur wanted it in his mouth. He wanted to choke down the delicious girth of it, run his lips over that incongruous silky skin. With a stranger from a club or an app hook-up, he might have got down on his knees.

"Over here," Arthur ordered as he moved towards his improvised bed. "Take all that off and get over here." Since Eames was just blinking at him, open-handed, he had to add, "Come on." 

Settling on the bed, he gave himself a few quick tugs to make sure there was something worth Eames's attention, and lay back to watch as Eames struggled his way out of pants and shoes. He was a striking sight, all that honed muscle holding him steady while he stood on one leg to free one foot and then the other. He was built like a power athlete, like a wrestler, aesthetic male perfection. No wonder Eames could never get clothes to sit quite right on him. He was made to be looked at like this, nothing on him but sweat.

As Eames approached, Arthur fought to get his lust-scrambled thoughts under control, but his exhausted mind kept ceding defeat to the more primal demands of his body. Shit. He was better than this. He was good in bed, he had techniques he'd worked hard on, but every one of them refused to come to mind as Eames knelt down. When Eames bent over, tilted his cock up, and took him in his mouth, Arthur's resistance gave out and all he could do was sway back on his elbows, eyes fluttering closed. 

The sudden heat of it went off in Arthur's brain like a potassium bomb, washing out all his straggling thoughts in pure white light. Eames's smart mouth. Eames's insubordinate mouth. Eames's smirking lips, pulling tight and coaxing around his cock. 

The last of the tension sapped out of him. The beautiful certainty of coming worked on him quicker than a shot of morphine. Nothing in the world mattered except the next few minutes, and the unbroken connection from body to body.

Murkily through the waves of contentment, Arthur thought how good Eames looked bending over him, the upwards slant from his shoulders to his rump as he bobbed down. The thick muscles powering his thighs and ass turned Arthur's mind to wondering what it would be like to fuck him. Get under all that brute strength, all those layers of artfully constructed swagger, and hit the tender, defenceless inside of him until he saw stars, speechless. It had never occurred to him to speculate before – did Eames even like to fuck that way? From what he knew of Eames in the field, he wasn't likely to be constrained by any polite notions of propriety, probably favoured the unexpected, and would almost certainly have fixed his attention on a new point of interest before their sweat had even dried on the sheets. 

For now, though, he was one hundred percent here. Eames's hand roamed busily while he sucked. He groped over Arthur's hips, felt up the contours of his belly, thumb stroking roughly over Arthur's navel. If he wasn't going especially deep, he more than made up for it with the tight, perfect clench of his mouth, cinching beautifully just under the head with every leisurely stroke. Of all the things he expected to find on a man like Eames, a mouth that could take off a wheel nut had not been high on the list. 

"Hey—hey," he said hoarsely, finding himself abruptly close to the edge. With a touch to Eames's forehead, he held off the end of proceedings to string the heady pleasure out as long as he could.

Eames held on to one last, excruciating stroke and let Arthur's cock fall back to leak against this belly. Then with one upward glance, eyes full of the electric light of desire, he prised Arthur's legs apart with both effortless hands and licked hard and hungry over his balls. 

Arthur had to bite down on a groan. If he'd had any resistance left in him, that would have swept it away. He had such a weakness for that – for men who liked the taste of man. As Eames mouthed at one ball and then the other, sucking, tugging gently, and resuming the indelicate assault with his tongue, Arthur writhed and spread himself open, wracked with frustration. The shameless suck and lick of Eames's mouth wrung hot and shuddering pleasure out of him, worked him up and made him mad with pleasure, and stopped just a hair's breadth short of hitting the place he needed to end the torment and tip him over. He wanted – another time, a different man, he might have asked for it – Eames's fingers in him, sliding slow and brilliant as deep as they could go.

If Eames was one of his hook-ups off Scruff or Grindr – some hot, temporary stranger he'd rendezvoused with on a street corner and taken home, he'd keep him in his bedroom all weekend where they could push each other to the limits of what their bodies could take. It had been years since he did that properly. Since he stumbled across the sort of chemistry that took days to fuck out of his system. He wanted to do everything, and then he wanted to do it again. 

Right now, Eames was mouthing at the base of Arthur's cock, pulling back to trace the stark, sensitive vein with the tip of his tongue. He sucked the head back into his mouth and let it pop back out, eyes hot on Arthur's. Eames's attention was glued to him, like he was waiting for Arthur to give up a tightly held secret, or lapse into begging, or just fall apart.

Arthur twisted himself free and sat up, abruptly irritated, because that was too much like the curious expression Eames wore when he'd just done something especially provoking, like kick the legs out from under Arthur's plan in front of the whole team. Yes, he thought, he'd quite like to fuck Eames, except his mind was too foggy for the tactical side of it, his body too clumsy for the physical, and he'd had no inkling that he needed to be smuggling condoms through portside security at Bushehr, along with the PASIV, the CIA issue trackers, and the military grade GPS.

Eames went easily onto his back when Arthur manhandled him, taking direction with far better grace in bed than he ever had over the planning table.

"Be my guest," he said with soft amusement when he worked out where Arthur was heading.

As he settled his knees on the cold concrete above Eames's head, he drank in the view of tree-trunk thighs with the thicket of hair between them, and the unmistakable flush of Eames's arousal. His kneecaps ached already. This never turned out well, not even with men he knew better. Outside of online porn, where judicious cuts and close-ups fudged the unworkable angles, it devolved into an awkward, frustrating jostle. But he wanted it this way. Top to toe. Giving and taking. He didn't want to make it easy.

Eames had him in hand, neck arching as, with a glossy ripple of abdominals, he angled up to where he could get his mouth on Arthur's dick. Despite himself, Arthur's eyes screwed closed. It was too much, the exquisite sensation of the tip grazing over the soft skin of Eames's lip, the clinging wet flesh just inside it, then the sudden scrape of bristle that made his toes curl. 

"Keep going," Arthur breathed faintly, and shuddered. 

A moment later, Eames sucked him properly into his mouth, and the melting heat of it took away his powers of speech completely. Eames's hand, heavy as a brick, locked into the small of his back to pin him in place with force that was pretty unbelievable given the tricky angle. There was no point fighting it, no point twisting his hips to find a way to get deeper in. He endured the noisy, shallow suction with aching balls until, finally, Eames arched his neck to open up a more accommodating angle and Arthur slid in as sweet and wet and deep as a dream.

He lost control for a bit there, fighting for more while Eames held him by the hips and decided what he could and couldn't do, keeping the depth to something he could manage. A mirror, Arthur thought shakily. He needed a mirror, or a camera - he needed to know what Eames looked like, with Arthur sinking down into his smart mouth, strands of come clinging to his smirking lips. He wanted to see how good they looked together.

All of a sudden he couldn't wait a second longer. Grasping Eames's plumped up dick, he rubbed the head of it over his mouth, over his tongue. Christ he got wet, leaking extravagantly all over Arthur's lips while his cock slid heated and strained through Arthur's fingers. And that was what made the indignity and tendon strain of this position worth it. Arthur was light-headed, practically gorging on fellatio when he came. Eames, he was distantly aware through the buzzing in his ears, took it gamely, and let Arthur do his worst.

Before the frenzy of his own orgasm had died away, he got to work, scrambling for a better range of movement. Eames bucked up when Arthur stroked him firmly between thumb and forefinger. 

"Yes," Eames murmured in a voice that sounded grazed and uncensored. "Arthur. Yes. Don't hold back."

Arthur wrapped his fingers tight, and worked him in greedy, determined jerks until he shuddered and gave it up, pulsing hard against Arthur's grip.

And then there was the come-down as the ache in his kneecaps and strain in his thighs asserted themselves. The dank smell of old hessian sacks started to reclaim the little cellar. The last of Arthur’s consciousness was seeping away like water down a drain.

"Just a sec." 

Eames's voice pulled him back from his thoughts, into a body that felt like a stone. He was pushing patiently at Arthur's hip, which was pinning him down at chin level. Arthur shuffled his knees, rolling into the pile of sheets and sacks. Eames felt around for the nearest bit of him and patted his thigh.

"I'll see myself out, shall I?" he asked drowsily.

It was a testament to the narcotic power of endorphins that all Arthur could hear in that was long-suffering patience, and maybe something warmer. Eames's hand trailed down to his knee and stayed there.

The next thing Arthur knew, it was morning.

**


	3. Chapter 3

When Arthur stumbled back up the stairs and emerged from the cellar in search of the rudimentary bathroom, he found the dining room table newly occupied. He clocked a couple of high-end circuit boards that looked capable of punching well above their minuscule weight, an orderly box of assorted fasteners, and a bundle of multi-coloured wires cinched around the middle with a shoelace. Then he clocked the woman by the window, delicately twisting a screw the size of a sunspot into place in a grey plastic casing.

"Finally," she said without shifting her attention from her task. "The spanner in the works."

Her light, accented vowels gave the turn of phrase an unfamiliar emphasis. Arthur couldn't quite be certain whether the reference was meant for him. He ran his hand through his hair and patted his neck on the way down, checking for any evidence of last night's epic misbehaviour.

Her gaze flicked up. "Shirin Ahmadi. Specialist engineering and disaster recovery. You must be the other point man."

"Arthur."

"Yes," she said distractedly, going back to her work and tilting the part into the sunlight as she frowned over it. She looked all of twenty seven, with a staid set of spectacles perched on her sharp, critical nose, and her headscarf discarded on the table to reveal a lopsided knot of dark hair at the back of her neck. "The one causing all the trouble."

"Me? I'm the one trying to keep this goddamn team on the—" he'd said before he caught the barely perceptible tension in her lip that said she was winding him up. "You've already met Eames then."

She grinned at her component and put it down on the table. "I was supposed to be writing a report for some of our European supporters, back in Esfahan. This is more entertaining. And I haven't even been shot at yet."

Flynn came into the room with his usual battlefield momentum, as if an invisible enemy platoon was eternally dogging his heels.

"I want a test run first thing after lunch," he said in his steely command voice, then frowned. "Is that too soon?"

Shirin gestured at the pieces littering the tabletop. "We'll find that out," she said evenly. "I believe that's what a test run is for." 

"Arthur," Flynn added, acknowledging his rumpled state with a disapproving once-over. "Our new engineer has my room, so I'll be bunking downstairs with you for the rest of the mission. Not too inconvenient, I hope. You won't even notice I'm there."

The smug glimmer in Flynn's eyes made it seem faintly possible the he might be capable of an actual smile, one day, if the right causal circumstances ever arose. 

**

After barely a chance to dip his head in cold water and scrub the worst of yesterday's sweat off him, he was drawn back downstairs by a string of wholehearted feminine cursing. 

"Wireless connection?" he asked.

"In your dreams," Shirin scowled. "The electric toaster is what they call modern technology in this fucking corner of the fucking goddamn —" 

She shifted Nasrin's laptop onto the windowsill and continued a stream of Farsi invective long enough to insult the computer, its manufacturer, and every single chip that had ever connected to the world wide web. 

"Oh." Her suspicious surprise as the connection sprung up to maximum exactly mirrored Arthur's of two days ago when he'd first met the elusive wireless signal from the government offices in the block behind them which they were piggybacking off.

At her call, Nasrin and her clutch of methodically tagged papers arrived, and behind her, Eames. 

He looked quiet and complacent, like the fight in him was turned down to minimum, and hell that was an appealling thought. A dark layer of bristle covered most of what Arthur had done to his face and neck last night. He kept a careful distance from behind Shirin's shoulder as she patiently waited on the constantly vanishing internet connection to finish her work.

It took her twenty minutes of bloody-minded insistence to log into two Twitter accounts and then a chatroom with a boxy white-on-blue layout that was so retro it almost had to be a deliberate style choice.

"We need a back-up," Arthur insisted. "In case they don't see it."

Shirin snorted. "Not see it? Those hardline boys spend every free moment online, downloading the latest fatwahs from their favourite mullahs and arguing about how to dispose of unbelievers. The Ayatollah and the Guardian Council are running the largest theocracy on the planet. Every time they blow their noses, it starts another debate."

"There's not so much news when you work in a big hole in the ground," Nasrin added more mildly. "By tomorrow morning, everyone on the base will be talking about the secret surprise inspection by the Supreme Leader's office."

Eames slouched back against the wall. "And what a delightful surprise they're in for. Still think you can impersonate a seventy five year old cleric in front of some of his most fanatical followers?"

"From two storeys high with the sun in my back, they'll see exactly what they expect to see," Nasrin told him. "So long as you get my beard right."

Eames gave her a slightly sleazy grin. "Your own mother will swear you're a bloke, when I'm done with you."

Shirin cocked her head in interest. "I should have a beard too."

"Next it'll be a hook and a wooden leg - Jesus, I didn't think this plan could get any more ridiculous."

"Now now, Arthur," Eames cut off his rant before it could start. "You vetoed the nuclear submarines and the weaponised drone army. Leave our main point man a little artistic licence, won't you?"

**

It took a quarter hour for their worn-down orange Paykan to get far enough out of town to set up their test site. Flynn announced their arrival in characteristic fashion. He swerved onto the roadside, jerked up the handbrake and, executing a swift 360 degree spin in the ancient low-riding vehicle, brought them to a dust-smothered halt.

"Way to shred the tyres, dickhead," Arthur scowled from where he'd wedged up against the door with the escaped hair from Shririn's headscarf smashed into his face.

"Only keeping in practice," Flynn said, cutting the engine as he swiveled neatly out of his seat. "I had to do that on the roof of the Chinese embassy in Baghdad once. Lost a lot of good men that day. We could have lost more if I let myself get rusty."

Flynn and his demons exited the vehicle.

"I flew a gyrocopter through the Channel Tunnel one time," Eames reminisced brightly as they were setting up the cheap alarm clocks and GPS sets that would form the test subjects for Shirin's improvised electro-magnetic pulse device. "Turns out it wasn't a skill set I'd ever need to use again."

"You think a gryo's hard to manoeuvre," Flynn replied as if they were brothers-in-law casually one-upping each other about the torque of their power drills. "Try landing a hot air balloon in a Georgian munitions factory under heavy machine gun fire."

"I don't remember seeing that bit in your official report," Arthur observed unkindly, thinking they had better things to do than watch Eames and Flynn's ongoing paramilitary courtship.

"All right gentlemen," Shirin cut in. "Take a few steps back unless you want to lose your cell phones as well."

About a second later, she flicked a switch on her remote and abruptly, with a ghostly shimmer in the air, all the cellular displays in the test batch died. 

"Bloody hell—" Flynn, standing closest, tapped his watch with a betrayed expression.

"That's why we do a test run," Shirin informed him conscientiously. "Apparently the range is a little longer than expected."

Flynn's haunted eyes said he'd once used that watch to burn the bars off a Saudi prison cell, or deflect a heat-seeking missile.

"I guess you don't get out in the field much," Shirin said to Arthur as she slid into the middle seat for the return journey.

"Oh our Arthur's got his war stories," Eames replied, holding the door open as Arthur slipped in beside her. "He once drilled out a safe in CIA headquarters using nothing but the force of his glare." 

That casually offered jibe made Arthur's temper rise, coming on top of the constant provocation of Flynn and the realisation that all the liberties he'd let Eames take last night had still not been enough to earn him any reprieve from the incessant disrespect.

"There it is," Eames said, softer, tilting Arthur's face with thumb and forefinger. The lingering touch stole the retort from Arthur's mouth. He watched Eames's attention slip from his eyes down to his lips and back up again, and thought that one of them had better say something glib, before the moment went on too long.

"Here's a better idea—" broke in Flynn from the front seat, glaring daggers at them via the rear view mirror. "We don't need the grenade launcher at all if I go down through the ventilation ducts in the barracks and rig the plant room with C4. While I'm down there I'll pick up the hostages myself. Keep the rest of you out of the firing line."

"Thank you, John." Nasrin slipped her sunglasses on and leaned back on her head-rest. "Let's give that some more thought."

**

"Arthur."

Flynn's voice came out of the darkness, just as Arthur had switched off the lamp and started to calculate the chances of managing a covert jerk-off with Flynn sleeping on the other side of the room.

He went on, "Topside physical combat isn't your field. That hasn't escaped my attention. You never signed on for a hostage rescue mission. I can find a professional to take over." 

Arthur stared at the darkness and willed his teeth not to grind.

"I have plenty of contacts."

"Of course you do," Arthur snapped. "And how many of them have been inside the compound? How many of them can get on top of the brief by eleven a.m. tomorrow?"

Goddamn him, Flynn could make even blind silence sound tormented. 

"I'm not in the business of getting civilians killed. Not if there's anything I can do to stop it."

The completely unasked-for gallantry threw Arthur for a loop. Was this -- He could practically hear Flynn smouldering his helplessly alpha smoulder in the darkness. He thought of Flynn out at the test site, casual beads of sweat rolling from his hairline down onto his shoulders in the afternoon heat, and yes, his body definitely had a faintly interested response to that. But he could still feel the deliberate touch of Eames's thumb on his jaw, the intimacy of the momentary connection, and - fuck them both to hell and back - that was the sort of reaction that was going to be a bastard to sleep on.

"How about we get a good night's rest?" he said stiffly. "Perhaps no-one will wind up killed or maimed. You never know."

**

From his cramped crouch in the qanat tunnel, Arthur didn't need any commentary to track the din of the helicopter slowly lowering itself onto the little landing space on the roof of the barracks building. Judging by the way the few soliders in his field of vision left off their frantic sweeping and grouting and moved towards it, pretty much the entire population of the base had noticed the arrival of the supposedly covert, supposedly official vehicle. 

"Hold position," Flynn ordered over the comms system, the clack of the copter coming through in stereo. "That's touch-down. Hold position. Doors opened. We're out on the roof now. Ground team, you're clear. Go!"

With a nod to Shirin behind him, Arthur scampered over the short distance to the access cover, glanced around to check that the space was as empty as Flynn had said, and slipped into the shaft with Shirin close on his heels. From just out of sight came the cheer of dozens of soldiers.

They took the underground sequence as swiftly as possible. Nasrin's impression of the nation's Supreme Leader was good enough for a drunken fancy dress party. It would fool the crowd full of faithful foot-soldiers as long as excitement and morning sunlight dazzled their vision. If the veil of deception slipped, their escape was down to the cache of weapons Flynn wore like an undershirt beneath his guard uniform. The longer it took Arthur to extract the hostages, the greater opportunity for Flynn's trigger finger to get itchy.

Breaking into the upper missile cache was a breeze the second time around. The Revolutionary Guards were talking heatedly as they climbed towards ground level, too busy speculating on their guests to notice intruders. His route to the lower cache was inconspicuous against the tide of personnel abandoning their posts for a glimpse of their supreme leader up on the surface. The EMP devices clamped neatly in place while Shirin cut the hostages free and explained the short walk that was going to take them to safety. 

"Tell us what we must do," said the first of them to struggle to her feet, pulling on the hooded jacket and pants Shirin had passed her. She met Arthur’s eye calmly. "We want to make it home."

It was only as they reached the top of the tunnel, where the facility was most heavily guarded, that Arthur's heart started to pound.

"Approaching the exit," Arthur murmured as the comms system came back online. "Targets in hand. All clear so far."

"Plan B is ready to activate," Flynn crackled in his ear.

"Plan B" was yet another of Flynn's euphemisms for throwing grenades about like confetti. Thankfully, Nasrin had made him keep it as a back-up option in case they had trouble getting out of the tunnel. 

"We're good," Arthur assured him hastily. "Let's aim for a low-key exit."

A few moments later, they emerged from the barracks building into the sunlight, and the noisy crowd. Arthur steadied the nearest hostage as the shock of open air made her steps falter. 

On the roof above them, Flynn's insane piece of pantomime actually appeared to be working. Nasrin, in her wig and beard and hastily sewn robe and black turban, waved at the cheering crowd below. Eames and Flynn looked suitably threatening with their shouldered Kalishnikovs, keeping any enthusiasts at a cautious distance. But as Arthur glanced up, a wiry commander had the nerve to assume their shouted Farsi commands didn't apply to him and approached. It took a handful of seconds for their plan to go up in smoke. The commander spoke to Nasrin, both of them shielding their faces against the draft of the copter's still spinning blades. Nasrin spoke in Flynn's ear over the rumble of the engine. A moment later, Flynn was bounding down the fire stairs at the side of the building, dragging the commander with him.

He disappeared into the crowd, only to plunge back into view, losing the commander, and striding up to Arthur's side. His dark gaze was trained intently on the entrance to the barracks building, and the grim bunker beneath it. 

"I'm going in," Flynn reported, to Arthur's sinking lack of surprise. "There's another prisoner. They're keeping a CIA operative in the control room."

"Anything I need to know about, lads?" Eames asked crisply over the comm. 

"No," said Arthur and Flynn in unison. Arthur continued, "We are not expanding the mission mid-way. Phone in a tip-off once we're over the border. His bosses can sort out an exchange."

"Her bosses," Flynn corrected, as if that made all the difference. "I know the CIA field officer over here. We worked a job together over the border in Basra. She had my back."

"Your back, was it mate?" Eames cut in.

"I don't care what she had," Arthur fumed. "This is a professional mission - not your personal goddamn quest. You cannot put this team at risk because of your bottomless need to go down in flames." 

Flynn's attention swept away, scoping the terrain at his flanks and rear, sizing up the danger.

"You're right. Eames, you're in command until I get back."

Eames's voice buzzed sternly in their ears. "Lovely. In that case, solider, get the fuck back up here and fly us out."

But Flynn was already checking his weapons, heading at an urgent pace towards the bunker. "The hostages are the priority. If I'm not back in three minutes, fly them out. I'll see you on the other side of the border." The comms system started to crackle like a distant gun battle as he vanished into the building. "If I make it."

Even over the two storey distance, he felt the charge of urgency in Eames as their eyes met.

"Get them up here right away,” Eames ordered. “Looks like we're about to need a very quick exit strategy." 

Arthur had to shove his way through the excited crowd with the hostages behind him and Shirin bringing up the rear. There was chanting around them now, drawing everyone's eyes to the roof. On the stairs, the going was almost impossible through the press of bodies, but finally they were at the top, bursting onto the roof where only the threatening wave of Eames's rifle was holding back the keenest young men from approaching their leader. He gestured with the rifle tip for Arthur to approach.

"Get the prisoners in there," Eames shouted, loud enough for the crowd to hear the carefully rehearsed Farsi. If they played it right, the bunker command would conclude that the Supreme Leader's own office had taken possession of the hostages, and it could be days before the embarrassed officials learned the truth and began their pursuit. Arthur pushed the hostages into the opened side door of the copter. "Strap yourselves in," Shirin told them, indicating the harnesses along both rear walls. "The flight might be rough."

A shot rang out, breaking over the chanting, and when Arthur spun around he saw that Eames had fired into the air in a last ditch attempt to hold back the impatient crowd creeping forward from the stairs. There should be two of them, but without Flynn, Eames alone stood between their party and a mob which would turn murderous the moment someone saw through their ruse. 

"Take the chopper and go," Arthur said, leaning into Eames. "This is going to turn ugly in a minute."

"And what will you be doing?"

Arthur jerked his head subtly towards the yard below, and the truck abandoned with its driver's door hanging open. There must be two hundred guards down there, and more of them still streaming up from the depths of the bunker.

"Flynn's on point. He makes the calls." Arthur wasn't trained for this, but years of physical peril in dreams had given him pretty good reflexes and taught him to focus his mind under stress. "He won't make it back up here. I'm going down."

"Like hell you are, Arthur. I'll do it."

He fired another air shot and pointed his rifle at the feet of the keenest guards, every muscle tensed to show them he meant business. A couple of young men on the last flight of stairs started to yell angrily, a discordant sound among the cheering.

Arthur told him: "If that thing comes under fire with me at the controls, everyone dies. You need to be here, in case Flynn doesn’t make it back."

Eames turned to him, eyes flicking over his face as if the answer might be there. With a terse breath, he turned side-on to the crowd, using his body to shield the view as he slipped his pistol into Arthur's pocket.

"You'll need this more than me then." His attention fixed on Arthur's jaw, and Arthur felt the phantom touch of his thumb, thinking what a shitty last contact that would be if he never came back. "Keep yourself safe." 

It must have been the oppressive beat of the chopper blade, or the drone of cheering behind it. He couldn't hear the provocation that was there in practically every word Eames said to him. He almost sounded like he meant it.

Arthur drove that maddening speculation from his mind as he wrote the stairs off as an impossibility and dove into the copter to get the grapple hook Flynn had insisted (over Arthur's heated objections) on bringing. A few moments later, he was dropping the last few feet onto the ground. To his right, an open door in the side of the admin building caught his attention. Thick steel. Bare, functional concrete floor. A few steps down the corridor confirmed his instinct. Weapons storage. He tore open a box of grenades and piled them into a backpack he found hanging from a peg outside. He'd do everything humanly possible to keep this mission covert, but Flynn's gift for explosive mayhem was practically a supernatural force, and he might as well go in prepared.

A faint rumble shook the ground under his feet. That would be Flynn's gift for explosive mayhem then. Sure enough, when he jogged back out to the yard area, the doors of the barracks building were oozing smoke like the first deceptive steamy wisps of a kettle on the brink of boiling.

When he reached the truck, Shirin was already inside it, military cap pulled down low over her forehead, beard still bushily in place. With a rueful last glance at her rope burned palms, she took the wheel to reverse the vehicle as close as she could get to the admin block.

"Wait here," he said, jumping out again. "I'm going in after him."

But he hadn't gone more than two steps before the ground shuddered again and the trickle of smoke coming from the bunker spewed out in a thick a cloud. On the barracks roof, Eames let out a spray of machine gun fire and shouted, but the distraction wasn't enough to hold the hindmost parts of the crowd when the smell of smoke hit them. Between one moment and the next, the cheering turned threatening as a few dozen soldiers drew their weapons and turned.

From the swelling cloud shot through with flame, a figure emerged, striding with deathly determination through the debris. Two figures. John Flynn, rimmed in burgeoning apocalyptic flame, and leaning on his shoulder ... a middle-aged gentleman with a figure that belonged in a generously fitted safari suit. Thank god, thought Arthur as he drew out one of the grenades. They still trained spies who didn't look like they modelled for underwear commercials on the side.

The crowd's exuberant energy had turned to menace. Soldiers surged across the yard in a threatening human wave, driven by a furious, formless sense of betrayal that zoomed in on the intruder. On Flynn. 

Arthur hefted the grenade, comparing its weight to a baseball and judging the distance as best he could. Flynn, scanning the area for opportunities, caught his eye and nodded. He threw.

The crash went on forever - first the deafening crack of the explosion and the blast that nearly blew him off his feet, and then the thud and tear of rock as the floor of the yard collapsed into the tunnel beneath it, leaving a ten-foot-wide rim of busted ground. The soldiers picked themselves up, weapons raised, and already some of them were skirting the edge of the crater. But the seconds he had bought Flynn were enough - he disappeared into the admin compound, and the next Arthur saw was a glimpse of him shooting out the side corridor and scaling the barracks wall with the rope Arthur had used to descend. Even from a distance of sixty yards, Arthur thought he could make out the strain in his bulging biceps as he hauled up his own weight and the weight of his cargo: one portly spy.

Up top, Eames was ushering his false Supreme Leader into the copter, snarling at the crowd as he scanned the melee below until his search caught and held on Arthur, tracked his path to the front gate, and jerked his head to say "Go!".

Shirin had the truck's engine running. "Tell them we're going after the copter," he said as they pulled up at the gate, where two well-drilled army guards had stayed at their post.

"I've got this," she shot over to him, then turned to the window with a swift stream of demands.

Whatever she said, the guard turned from distrustful to wary to resigned. His hand was already shifting towards the gate control when the chance angle of the side mirror showed Arthur the last sight in the world he wanted to see. Flynn was standing on the side of the barracks building with the grenade launcher on his shoulder.

"No--" Arthur was shouting futilely into the comms system when the gate in front of him burst into splinters and dust.

When the smoke drifted off, the way was clear. Except for the right hand gate post that was now leaning its iron weight across the front of the truck. When Shirin put her foot down, it crept an inch towards the windshield in an unpleasant grind of metal, but remained pinning them in place. The wheels span on the tarmac and fell still.

Above them, the chopper rose noisily into the air. Shirin looked at him with something hungry and keen behind her alarm. Something that reminded him she was young behind her bravado. Maybe too young to envisage what could be done to them if they got trapped here. They had a matter of seconds before the crowd stopped shooting at the disappearing helicopter and noticed them.

"Wait here," he said, already slipping out to wedge his shoulder under the foot-thick span of steel. With every last desperate breath in his body, he pushed that motherfucker up. The veins bulged on the side of his neck and forehead as the ache in his temples turned dizzying. It lifted a half-inch, but the moment he tried to swivel it, his strength broke and it fell back, deepening the dent in the truck's panel work.

On the driver's side of the truck, one of the guards shouted, Shirin replied harshly, and there was the clatter of a rifle being raised and cocked. They could run. It was better than nothing, and there was a small chance they could get beyond rifle range before both of them were taken out. The guard circled around the back of the truck.

Shirin didn't need his glance. She had already whacked the truck in reverse and slammed into the guard, sending his gun flying with a spray of bullets. The gate strut crashed down onto the roof of the guard station, still barring their way. The guard's partner was on his feet now, calling for reinforcements. The tyres shrieked as Shirin put the pedal to the floor, frightened now, but the only result was the smell of burned rubber that made him cough.

"Need some heavy lifting?" he heard from above him, and as he jerked his head up in shock, Eames swung himself down off the top of the wall, his pants bloody and shredded to the knee from the barbed wire. 

Before Arthur's mouth could work, he'd slid under the strut and set his back and thighs against the weight of it. Slowly, impossibly, it rose. The sweat was already gathering along Eames's flushed and straining brow as Arthur added his strength to the upper end and slowly shifted it over the top of the chassis and onto the side of the road.

"Get in before you get hit," Eames told him with a nudge, just as the first bullet glanced off the roof and ricocheted into the distance. A moment later he was gone, drawing his rifle off his back as a second shot clipped him in the left arm and threw him down. 

"Eames!"

Arthur watched him roll into the cover of a forklift as the gunfire raked up dust in front of him. As another spray of fire whistled too close to his ear, Arthur threw himself back into the truck.

Eames looked at the gap that separated him from the truck, thick now with dust and bullets. He looked at the approaching throng of soldiers - twenty, maybe thirty guns between them.

"Go," Eames mouthed, gesturing towards the road.

Arthur shook his head.

The passenger side window shattered and a shot dinged off the hub cap. None of them were going anywhere without tyres.

"Fuck off," Eames mouthed, indicating out the gate to where two tiny helicopters had cleared the horizon and started to close in.

As Shirin put her foot down, Arthur remembered the pistol in his pocket and threw it through the open window. 

"Fuck—" he gritted out helplessly as they sped away, thumping the window casing, and thumping it again until his bone ached. 

He kept his eyes glued in the rear vision mirror while the smoking compound receded, as if faithfully watching the spectacle would be the slightest help to Eames now. "The qanat," he yelled into the comm system, remembering, as the link dwindled away to nothing. "The way we came in, Eames. You get yourself the fuck out of there." 

Not even static answered him.

When they cleared an outlying spur of the mountain and lost sight of the target, he leaned back and closed his eyes. In his head, he was composing the speech he was going to make to Flynn, if Eames didn't come out of this alive, the long and righteous and passionate speech he was going to make right before he shot the disastrous, conceited fucker between the eyes. 

"That was more fun that I expected," Shirin said in a brittle voice. The truck's engine growled as she shifted it down gear. The dry, grey landscape passed by. "Until the end."

Arthur looked out the window and figured he'd never had a better excuse to brood a little.

"I lost one brother to the military police," she added, as they approached the town's outskirts. "But I got the other one back. Give him a chance."

**

It took them less than half an hour to dispose of their military uniforms, park the truck in the shadow of a minor mosque where it would be least visible from the air, buy a new shirt for Arthur and a whole outfit for Shirin, and steal a motorbike from out the back of a coffee house whose owner Shirin was pretty sure wouldn't miss it until evening.

Shirin handed him a bottle of water and a big flatbread in a red striped plastic bag.

"It's four hours' drive, Arthur. The road goes through one of the main drug routes out of Afghanistan. There are police and the heroin merchants. Travelling at night is a danger."

In the direction of the bunker, the sky was empty. Flynn would have landed the helicopter at their rendezvous point by now, with a team of fit and grateful cyclists, and a spy who owed his life to mistaken identity and Flynn's unsleeping libido. Nasrin would be staying out of his way as she compiled her dossier of information and set up a meeting with the US Consul to hash out terms of sale. Eames could be anywhere. Including some concrete floored basement holding cell, bleeding out from his bullet wound while they tried to beat the truth out of him.

She shifted uncomfortably on her feet. "I'll be in town for another two hours, waiting for my cousin. If he comes back, I'll make sure he's okay."

In two hours, watching her disappear down the street in the back of a new silver Peugeot, the heavy feeling in his stomach had turned to outright dread. The sense of vindication went out of composing his righteous speech to Flynn the moment it occurred to him that he might actually get to deliver it.

When he went back through the unlocked door, the bakery was empty. All their gear was sitting in the Paykan parked in a storage shed in the abandoned desert airfield where Flynn's helicopter had come from. Some colleague of Nasrin's would have a nail-biting time coming down to retrieve it over the coming days.

It was impossible to believe that Eames might not be coming back. Eames who was always, unavoidably, there, sitting on the fringes of the job and storing up penetrating observations to throw out at the moment of maximum impact. Eames who never needed to be told anything twice, once the clock had started ticking. Eames who showed up unfailingly where he was scheduled to be, no matter how many projection mobs he had to claw through to get there, and no matter how much ugly, insubordinate attitude he brought with him. 

The ashes of their burned papers were cold in the stone oven. The rooms were depressingly empty. He went out to the courtyard and sat on the edge of the half-full pool, and thought that there was no way Eames could be dead when he could still remember the exact shape of those powerful hands moulded around the side of his neck. 

He tried to still his heartbeat, because there was nothing at all he could do. Their remote rendezvous point was out of contact via the internet or cell network, and they'd been given firm instructions not to call the village's heavily monitored land lines. His contact in the US State Department was far too ambitious to chuck his whole career away by making the sort of extreme threats it would take to wrest a suspected data thief from military custody in less than 24 hours.

He cleaned a floating pomegranate flower off the surface of the water and rested it on the edge. When the shadow of the roof touched the long red bloom, he would get on his stolen bike and go. The shadow moved all too quickly, swallowed up the flower, and kept on advancing eastward.

At the sound of a heavy vehicle outside, he jumped to his feet and moved towards the corner, thinking how incredibly goddamn stupid he would feel if they dragged him to Eames's cell and threw him in. Breath held, he listened as the truck slowed up to take the corner, engine falling quiet for a heart-stopping moment, and then rumbled on its way.

There were footsteps on the roof. Slower than last time. Uneven. But when Arthur opened his eyes, Eames was dropping down into the courtyard. He swayed on his feet, arms swinging out for balance, and promptly fell down. A half-second later, Arthur was on his knees with that stupid Revolutionary Guard uniform tearing open in his hands as he felt around for damage.

"Hello," Eames said in a bruised sounding voice. 

"You idiot," Arthur told him passionately. "You're worse than the mighty Flynn, you and your hero complex."

"Hello," Eames repeated, softer.

Eames had taken some blows to the face, his legs were a mess, but the only place he really flinched from was the bullet wound in his upper arm, which had been cinched with an improvised tourniquet that would keep him alive long enough to enjoy the horror of having it cleaned out and stitched.

He left his hand splayed over Eames's ribs, holding him down. Eames was keeping very still in any case, as if there was no direction he could move in without causing himself pain.

"You stupid insubordinate cowboy of a—"

Eames had enough strength left to do one thing, apparently. He hooked his good hand in the neck of Arthur's shirt and drew him down until their mouths came together. Arthur heard a shaky, frustrated groan escape from his own throat, and then he was kissing Eames's stupid lips, pressing down into the reckless taste of him. Eames just sighed his mouth open and let Arthur do what he could with the unworkable angle, and all Arthur wanted do was kiss him some more, on his stupid, pouty bottom lip, on the grating edge of his teeth, on the smirking corner of his mouth, on the bristly little dip above his chin.

When he left off, with one last bruising clash of lips, Eames's eyes had drifted closed as if he'd been given a morphine drip instead of pointless kisses. The only bit of him that seemed to work was the fist in Arthur's shirt, which continued its iron grip, as if Arthur had any intention of moving. 

At the touch of Arthur's fingers on his forehead, Eames's eyelashes fluttered and he murmured encouragingly. His hair was heavily obstinate as Arthur brushed it back.

Arthur said quietly, "We need to be on the road."

"Or you could stay here," Eames countered hazily, nonsensically, "while I die in your arms."

Arthur's eyes narrowed in suspicion - he was way too worn down to juggle Eames's piss-taking. But the soft touch of Eames's finger on his bottom lip was hard to mistake for teasing.

"Do me one last favour and don't die on me," Arthur said mildly, removing Eames's finger and wrapping his hand around it. "No way in hell am I going to lose a man if John fucking Flynn can get his whole team out in one piece."

A bit more idle making out meant there was no time left for first aid, but afterwards Eames slumped placidly behind him on the bike for four tense hours, silently bleeding into the back of his jacket, so perhaps there had been some anaesthetic side effects after all.

**


	4. Chapter 4

It was barely light when Arthur jerked out of sleep in a hazy panic. An urgent male voice amplified through low-grade speakers thundered from somewhere close at hand. Grating. Incomprehensible. 

Call to morning prayers. Arthur deflated back into the makeshift pillow and pulled his jacket up to his neck, waiting for his pulse to settle as the chanting drew to a close. In the shadows under the window, he picked out Eames's sleeping form, huddled under two layers of blankets with his back pressed against the wall to keep him from rolling onto his wounded arm. He strained his ears until he caught the faint rumble of indrawn breath. Then he let himself drift back to sleep until the end of the service, the rhythm of prayers floating up through the curlicued arches of the windows. 

He had barely made his cautious way down to the little house out the back of the mosque before their host was rising from his seat and ushering Arthur into it. "Welcome," said Ali with an immediate smile. "Please." He moved his empty teacup off the table and replaced it with a fresh one. "Sit."

With his trimmed beard, loose robes and thin, serious face, he so completely resembled a religious scholar that it was hard to remember that, alongside his faith, he was also a dedicated activist in the underground, who'd had to exile himself to this far-flung corner of the country to escape the crackdown that had preceded the election before last.

"How did you sleep?" Ali asked, lifting aside a white cloth to uncover a platter of bread, fruit, yoghurt and honey. Arthur's appetite woke up so abruptly that it was a struggle not to heap his plate up like a man at his last meal. Across the little table, Nasrin daintily helped herself to a few more grapes.

"Great, thanks," Arthur assured him distractedly between mouthfuls, skipping the memory of the hour or so Eames had spent thrashing in a tormented doze before he'd finally wedged himself into a position he could sleep in without pain. "Where's Flynn?"

"Chaperoning one of our cyclists on a little walk," Nasrin informed him with barely more than a glimmer of suggestion. "She needed to stretch her legs."

Arthur idly wondered which one, and why he'd stopped at one when, by the sounds of it, he had all four of them in the palm of his manly and indestructible hand. 

"Where will you go next?" Arthur asked, feeling obliged to replace the Farsi conversation that his arrival had ended. 

She smiled at him over the rim of her cup. "How lucky that you ask. I have had an idea about that."

At that point, the first bite of honey-smeared bread hit his taste-buds and he tuned her voice out a little as his body rode out the high of sheer relief. He took another plate and loaded it up to take to Eames, thinking how much worse a state he was going to be in with his blood loss and dehydration and every limb stiff from the mauling he'd taken.

"Hang on - what's the point of splitting it up?" 

Nasrin sipped her tea and gave him a moment to catch up. "The point is very simple, Arthur. The point is money. I sell the layout of the facility and the location of the warheads to my contact in the US embassy in Paris. You sell the code for the EMP disruptor to your CIA people so they can disarm the missiles if the need arises. Two transactions. Two prices."

She had not, until now, struck him as greedy, beyond what was needed to advance her principles. Was this, he wondered, another manifestation of Flynn's influence?

"Your next job," he spoke aloud, his mental wheels finally turning, lubricated by the first hot, reviving sip of tea. "You said it wouldn't be cheap. So what is it?"

"Inception."

Eames was standing in the doorway, looking pale and rumpled and strangely unthreatening with his left arm bound up across his chest. "Government or military would explain the interrogation you gave me after our first trip down into the bunker," Eames continued. "And for the amount of bribe money you're putting aside, it had better be someone fairly high up."

Her scrutiny shifted between the two of them, and Arthur couldn't be sure which one of them she was overcoming doubts about.

"Our new president has not yet shown his true self," she began, treading cautiously. "He has been very careful to appear friendly to the Guardian Council. He has spoken like a traditionalist. He has not aligned himself with any of the moderate groups. This is why he was permitted to become a candidate, and why they did nothing to prevent his victory."

"But he is not what he seems," Ali continued, his eyes brightening. "My friends in Tehran have met with him. He is ... to our ideas, he is-"

"He is a friend. He will be the one to give our country back to us. It will take years to do it without blood on the streets. Many years. But he is our best chance, now in this moment in our history. We will protect him from the Guardian Council. That is all. We have to give him the chance to do what we hope for."

"It would take years to pick off all twelve of them," Arthur reasoned, plans assembling themselves unbidden in his mind, sifting out the unlikely from the impossible. "And to target all of them in the same place - it would be the most audacious plan I've ever heard of."

"Count me in," said Eames, smiling darkly.

Ali glanced swiftly at Nasrin.

"This is a task we will undertake ourselves," she told them. "The team will be local, every one. But your advice would be welcome. Especially if it is true that Domenic Cobb had some success in this area."

Arthur kept his face determinedly steady. He had no illusions about what Saito might do if loose talk ever undid their work on Robert Fischer. But if there was ever a compelling reason for sharing their secret success …

He was phrasing a neutral response when John Flynn came launching through the open window, rolled once, and caught a beaten copper jug a few inches off the floor. He holstered his pistol and replaced the jug on the table. 

"Loose perimeters, soldier," he nodded gravely to Arthur, who was quietly putting down the bread knife he'd snatched up. "We're not out of hostile territory yet."

Notwithstanding Ali's hospitable offers of clothes, he was still sporting the combat fatigues he'd worn under yesterday's Revolutionary Guard uniform, now charred, battle-stained and gaping raggedly at the neck. Though his eyes were ringed in their usual care-worn lines, smugness wafted off him like new cologne. Through the wall, not one but two sets of feet could be heard coming in the front door and down the hall.

"I'm afraid our topside point man had gone missing in action," Eames informed him crisply. "Error of judgment, we all succumb to distraction now and again. No harm done."

He gave Flynn his most affable, infuriating grin - the one that had snapped Arthur's temper in a practically Pavlovian reaction on job after job. From the sidelines now, it revealed itself for the smart bit of psychological manipulation it was. Eames's face was all unflappable good humour, but the hard outline of his arms and back broadcast a permanent invitation to spar - a provocation that made a man's instincts want to answer. And yet there was no way to respond to him that wasn't an embarrassing over-reaction. They faced off, Flynn's glower meeting Eames's mercilessly cheery taunt.

"When you're done, gentlemen," Nasrin said, starting to stack the breakfast plates. "We'll plan our route over the border."

"Oh, Eames here is the expert on the western provinces," Flynn said sulkily. "It was pitch black the last time I made crossing, snow in the mountain passes three feet deep. Weren't you on contract for Haliburton, back in the day? You'd have done it with a professional assault team and state-of-the-art sat nav." 

"I liked to have a manicurist and a feng shui consultant when I could get them." There was real gravel in Eames's voice now, as if he might be goaded into anger despite himself. "I've no idea why you keep slumming it on Her Majesty's black books. No medals, no honour roll - not even biscuits with your afternoon tea."

"I'll tell you what I think," Arthur broke in, and worked outwards from the basic thought that he wanted to get Flynn out of his sight as quickly and permanently as circumstances allowed. "You should lie low for a week, John. They'll be watching traffic on all borders. There's nowhere to get fuel, unless you know of some ex-soviet army airfields that weren't taken over by the US. And you never know which local warlord you'll be negotiating with once you touch down. Or whether they’ll drag you off for a bit of torture first."

Since the glitter in Flynn's eyes hadn't quite tipped over into a decision, he added, "Don't worry. I've already called ahead. They know not to expect you until next week."

Eames caught his eye, sparkling like the god of mischief himself, and happily grabbed a piece of bread from the tray Ali was removing.

"If you think our hostages can stand another week not knowing when they'll sleep somewhere safe," Flynn replied, reaching down to the gravest notes in his register, "then you clearly haven't been paying attention to the state they're in."

Arthur looked pointedly over Flynn's shoulder and made absolutely no observations about how close an examination Flynn had made of the state they were in. He made a casually dismissive swipe of hand. "Your call. I still say the smart choice is to wait."

"Better part of valour and all that," Eames chipped in helpfully, as if tone deaf to the conflict in the room.

John Flynn had been made for other times than these. He belonged in an age where legendary heroes fought one-on-one while armies looked on; when one man and his sword could lay waste to a battalion. He had none of the self-effacing discipline that made for a good modern soldier. In fact, nothing made him happier than flouting the authority of desk-bound bureaucrats, or anyone who tried to bridle his reckless instincts.

"I'll take that on board," he told them, not very convincingly, as he strode from the room.

"He'll be in in the air in an hour," Nasrin predicted, looking less than pleased. "Won't he?"

Eames made an equivocal sounding noise as he leaned back against the wall, shifting his bound arm uncomfortably. His face was pale, the lines on it etched in dry skin, oily strands of hair revealing private glimpses of scalp. There was a line of dark, dried blood on his neck, behind his ear.

Arthur fetched him an open bottle of water from the table. From close up, it was impossible to miss how his every breath was shallow, as if taking any measure he could to spare the strain on his upper body. Arthur had the decidedly unscientific urge to touch him, an open palm against his cheek or a squeeze of his good shoulder. A misguided instinct that said the mere act of caring might wield its own healing power. 

"How well can you get about with that?" He nodded at Eames's sling. 

Eames took his time knocking back the bottle with his eyes half closed, then fixed Arthur with a wary look. "Well enough."

"Good. I'm told our perimeters need seeing to."

**

They hadn't quite reached the front door when Eames stopped to fix the knot of his sling, reaching back awkwardly to where it dug into the side of his neck.

"Second day is when you wish you were dead," he said, going gingerly with his injured arm. "Right now, it feels like I got hit twice in every limb, and run over by a tank for afters."

Arthur stopped with his hand on the door, irritated by the delay.

Eames added, "If you're waiting for the right moment to offer a bit of reciprocal physiotherapy, might I suggest that it's never going to get more opportune than this?"

He waited pointedly, not backing off, shifting his eyes away from the shafts of sunlight that came through the filigree carving of the half-moon shaped lintel over the door. "Or has the appeal worn off now that we're no longer in mortal peril?"

There was bitterness there, and a resignation Arthur really didn't like. His plan to steer them onto clearer terrain, where they could work this thing out on a physical level beyond the shifty grasp of words, seemed to have hit a roadblock. 

"You really care about that perimeter, do you?" Eames said, softly now, sounding distant.

"I'm not going touch you," Arthur replied. He struggled to articulate his deeply felt aversion, remembering the hospitality he experienced here and in Tehran, a sort of civilised gentility he'd never expected to find in this century. At home, good manners meant leaving your guest a list of the best places to grab a takeaway coffee in the morning, but here it was present in every gesture between host and guest. 

"Not here," he clarified, and stepped over to straighten the sling, twisting it in a purely therapeutic gesture so that the ball of the knot sat on the outside. He took his time, close enough to feel the faint heat radiating off Eames's chest and arms, as he let the pads of his fingers brush against the back of Eames's neck freely while he worked. "We're practically in a mosque."

"Right," Eames said when they'd parted. The splotches of sunlight highlighted the lines in his face, the lashes that flagged the subtle movement of his eyes, like guidelines to Eames's brain that were usually invisible. They flickered uncertainly. "I almost thought you weren't interested."

Arthur glanced at the column of his neck, the meaty, unyielding strength of it, and let himself linger on the memory of how he'd pretty much tried to eat Eames alive two nights ago.

He looked Eames in the eye. "Did you?"

**

By the time they reached the little valley where the helicopter was hidden, Eames had rediscovered his smirk, and clearly worked out which bit of the perimeter Arthur had fixed his intentions on checking.

"I've made do with worse," he was beginning as they slid down the last of the dry, grey slope and Arthur pulled himself up into the rear cargo hold of the chopper. "One time on the Tunisian border, the shadow of a camel was the only spot you could get your bare skin out without burning the hair off—"

He slammed to a halt, mouth open, as Arthur shrugged off his jacket and dropped it.

"Get in the vehicle, soldier."

Eames looked up at him placidly. "I'll just get in there, shall I?" 

One foot raised, he barely needed Arthur's hand to power himself up the high step - and Arthur made a mental note that, if good fortune ever brought the opportunity his way, he was going to take an indulgently long time getting acquainted with the sweaty, mouth-watering strength of Eames's thighs.

Inside, with the door slid shut, it was dark and cool, the air dense with combat smells: avgas and old sweat, worn leather fittings. Arthur hooked his hand over the waist of Eames's trousers, taking in the clench of muscle that answered his touch. In the gloom, Eames was very still, filling the space with the echo of his quick breaths. With his arm bound, and his taunting mouth hidden in shadow, he seemed strangely approachable and human.

Arthur seized the opportunity to feel him up. He reached out to grope up the iron curves of Eames's good arm, letting his thumb dig into the resistance of his biceps. Through the negligible barrier of the borrowed shirt, stretched to its limits, he could feel everything; the cords of tendons, the deceptive give of resting muscle. His fingers spanned barely half of Eames's neck, but it was enough to feel the raised body temperature and speedy pulse. He got a low grumble of interest when he pushed his thumb into Eames's mouth, pressing freely into the warm meat of his tongue. When his other hand brushed over the front of Eames's trousers, he felt for the heated swell of arousal and stroked it with his knuckles until he had Eames pushing back against him.

But above the responsive jerk of his hips, Eames was holding his upper body gingerly still.

"I'm not going to do this if it's hurting you. Jesus, Eames, we've got two hostile borders to cross - those stitches have got to hold."

The empty space went awfully quiet when the raspy rhythm of Eames's breath disappeared. 

"God forbid I should put your job in danger," Eames pulled fractionally away. "I could never forgive myself."

And that unspoken hurt - the total over-reaction - was such a perfect example of what made him such a head-fuck to work with that Arthur wanted to punch him in the face - and could have, except for the thought that his left bicep had a hole shredded right through it, a hair's breadth from shattering the bone, because he'd put his body on the line for the job, yet again. Because he'd put himself exactly where Arthur needed him to be, just when Arthur needed it most.

"Eames—"

Non-verbal, he reminded himself. For an expert character actor, Eames had a woeful habit of taking everything the wrong way, at least when it came out of Arthur's mouth. He'd brought them here to get past all this. 

So he curved himself around the obstacle of the sling and tilted his head into a kiss. He felt the instant parting of Eames's lips, the way he leant into the dead centre of it without a heartbeat's hesitation. From close in, he kissed Eames again, with more commitment this time. The slow, sweet drag of lips went on and on, and he thought, how long? How long had it been since he kissed someone just for the sake of intimacy, without his mind already on what came next?

Eames's good hand clasped his elbow gently, holding him in place as they eased their feet a bit closer to smoothe out the angle. The milky, leisurely taste of tea slipped between them as their mouths opened up and pressed together. It was practically impossible that this was Eames here with him, breaking away to kiss his cheekbone, a slow line of caresses along his jaw. He reached out to clutch at Eames's ass, stroking over the stretch of the borrowed trousers he'd squashed his wrestler's build into. The sigh against his mouth was suddenly tight, and a moment later, Eames was pulling him into the grind of his hips.

"Sit down," Arthur heard himself say, feeling around until he found a fold-down seat. 

"I hardly think—"

"Eames. Sit down so I can suck your dick without worrying you'll fall over."

It took a few hot-handed moments to get Eames's trousers down. The anticipatory thrill of kneeling was heightened by the lingering battleground air of the helicopter. He leaned in and kissed the half-hard length of Eames's cock where it lay over the top of his thigh. He ran his mouth along the length of it as the last of its give stiffened away from Eames’s body. Then he had the head against his tongue, filling up his mouth as the bitter taste of it made him suck and press down for more.

Eames let a held breath break out of him, felt around for Arthur's hand over his thigh, and gripped it. And Arthur worked his mouth down, nudging the hot obstruction of Eames's cock into his soft palate, a little deeper, a little deeper until he had to force his throat to open up and give him what he wanted. 

Eyes closed, his vision swirling black and blood red and shot through with hypoxia sparks, he swallowed down and down, until his mind was empty of everything except the feeling of Eames's cock sliding into him, so easy now, powerfully solid, alive. The tension and peril of the last week were swept away. His higher brain function was drowned out by the thump of urgent physical need. When he lost himself in this, he lost his point man title, too. Here, he forgot everything except the next act. Breathe. Suck. Swallow.

Hoarse, incoherent sounds came from Eames above him and the grip on his hand had turned crushing. And he wanted that more than anything - wanted to hear Eames losing control, wanted to tear all those layers of nonchalance and wry detachment right off him and leave him vulnerable and needy, at the mercy of Arthur's mouth.

With a groan twice as intense as anything he'd made last night as he bit down on a rag while the stitches went in, Eames came, jolting, shuddering as Arthur sucked him dry and, finally, let him go. Bent over Eames's thigh, he panted breathlessly, giddy again with the flood of air in his lungs. 

He fumbled his belt open, shoving his way in to clutch the arousal that had worked itself up to an ache through all that eager fellatio. He thought about the solid thrust of Eames's cock, drilling hot and salty into his throat, and wrapped his fingers around himself.

Eames made a muffled noise of objection. "I'm not an invalid, you know. Come up here where I can reach you."

Urgency warred with the husky candour of Eames's request. He had a vision of those hands at the height of their strength, flexed around the rope that had lowered Arthur's full weight over a hundred-foot drop. He stood up, too impatient to care that his pants slid down to his ankles as he shifted around.

Eames's eyes glinted in the foggy light from the dirty windows. He rested Arthur's shaft on his fingers and dragged the knuckled spur of his thumb up its length, while Arthur bit the inside of his lip and struggled to keep his knees steady.

"What are you waiting for?" 

"Only getting acquainted," Eames told him unapologetically as he wrapped his fingers loosely and indulged himself with a few maddeningly gentle tugs, skimming over the skin to cinch under the head, as if Arthur's cock didn't work exactly like every other man's. The delay wasn't doing anything to take the heat out of Arthur's desire, though. He was emphatically wet, getting messier with each stroke. Eames's grip was slippery as it tightened around a helpless, eager jerk.

"Lovely," Eames murmured, and then as abruptly as an ambush, he switched speed and got to work. 

He started rough and stepped it up from there, going quicker and tighter as if he wanted to test out what Arthur could take. The last thing Arthur cared to do was stop him. There was a power in his grip, and friction too. Arthur was wet enough at the head to make it slick going, but further down the drag was brutal and - christ - Arthur craved it like this. Hard and fast and hungry, hurtling towards an orgasm that was going to hit him like a crash barrier. 

"Close?"

"Not—" Eames's grip tightened, dragged up hard, his callused hand wrenching roughly along the underside, and Arthur had to lean his hand on the wall. "Yeah," he heard himself say breathily. "Yeah, like that, like that."

He might have gone on like that, or maybe he was just groaning nonsense into the empty space as Eames worked him over. He remembered saying Eames's name, once, when he was so close he couldn't stand it, and then Eames was bending down and sucking Arthur into his mouth, and the sudden wet heat tipped him over, Eames's grip still milking the base as he swallowed down everything he could get. 

"Easy," Arthur said with a shaky laugh, when the excruciating wrack of it had released him enough to speak. "That's good, that's perfect."

Eames had inviting lips, Arthur had noticed recently. Being the only mark of softness on a body that was all ruthlessly tended muscle made them all the more distracting. Right now, flushed and wet, they were the sexiest sight Arthur could remember. He stroked the lower lip with his thumb, gentler than he'd touched Eames's mouth the first time. It must have been the unaccustomed height advantage. Eames's eyes, when he glanced up, looked unguarded and intent.

Eames leaned back stiffly, as if remembering his injuries at last. He smoothed down Arthur's borrowed shirt and settled his hand on his hip, indecently warm through the polyester. After a couple of minutes, Arthur gave up his grip on the wall and on Eames, and put himself to rights. 

Not a moment too soon. 

"Stay behind me—" came the unmistakable sound of John Flynn in full battlefield crisis control. "Get out of sight. Keep—"

Through the window, Arthur watched as a battered utility vehicle cleared the ridge above and came hurtling down the slope towards where Flynn was shepherding the hostages in the direction of the chopper. The three Revolutionary Guards across the front seat looked like angry frontiersmen, used to defending their borders by any means required. 

"I've got this," said Eames beside him, drawing an unlikely pistol from his back pocket.

But before he could use it, the vehicle swerved left, picking out a firmer path than its skidding quarry had taken, gaining ground. Arthur saw the calculation in Flynn's face as he predicted the likely trajectories. He split off to the side, turned and threw his arms wide in a ridiculous challenge - come and get me. Man against machine. One heartbeat, two, and then the vehicle slammed into him, throwing him up over the hood and out of sight.

"Here," Eames was calling as the hostages gained the sanctuary of the helicopter and climbed up inside.

A hundred yards away, the vehicle drifted to a halt. The sound of angry shouting carried over. There was a gunshot. Then Flynn calmly opened the door and stepped out, heedless of the unconscious body that slumped forward over the steering wheel behind him. As he turned towards the chopper, he was wiping a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.

"Let's not stick around for the farewells, hmm?" Eames - clever Eames - was already pulling back the door on the opposite side of the cargo hold and climbing down through it. “Best of luck, ladies. You couldn’t be in better hands.”

From a straggly olive grove by the valley wall, they shielded their faces from dust as the chopper lifted off. At the controls, Flynn shot straight up into the air as if a dozen targeted missiles were already on their way. Briefly, the rugged lines of his face were visible through the glass, staring off at some far distant source of danger. Then he was lost to sight. 

**

"Looks like mission command is all yours again," Eames observed, contemplating the empty sky.

Arthur surveyed the smouldering aftermath of Flynn’s heroics with distaste.

There were dead bodies to be dealt with now – or worse, if Flynn had been less than thorough. It had never come to this before. Not topside, at least. Not for Arthur. 

He went over to where the vehicle waited. There was no avoiding it, he was going to have to look at their faces. Picture their wives and children and silent, broken-hearted fathers. He was about to find out what a body looked like when the spirit in it had been extinguished.

But first he was going to need a shovel for the digging. He leapt into the back of the truck, but as he pushed aside the guns and broken cannon parts, all he found underneath was more weaponry. Some broken bricks. An old book in French. A silver candelabra. A portrait that looked recently torn off someone’s wall. 

Sweaty and irritable, he abandoned the fruitless search and came back to the cabin. There were no other options here, he told himself sternly. Railing bitterly against Flynn’s recklessness was hardly going to bring him back here to clean up his own mess. He gritted his teeth and reached for the handle.

“No need for that,” Eames said, trudging up behind him. “Leave it.”

Part of Arthur’s job as point man was to always have the answer. It fell to him to scramble together whatever flimsy and desperate materials he could lay hands on, and fashion a solution that would hold together just long enough to carry them over the line. No matter what calamity befell them, the one thing he could never do was shrug his shoulders and give up. 

But Eames had been a commander too. His chest and shoulders said it, his vigilant attention said it. Right now, his voice was inviting Arthur to lean on him and lay down the burdens of his office. 

His arm fell back by his side. “No?” 

Eames leaned in the shattered window and switched on the headlights. “A flat battery to make sure it can’t be moved without heavy equipment. And a spot of impact damage to throw some doubt on cause of death. If you don’t mind lending me your able-bodied assistance.”

Wedging his back against the rear of the vehicle, his strength, combined with Arthur at the driver’s side window, was just enough to get the thing moving. Its momentum picked up at last, and carried it further down the slope where it smashed into a grove of trees and came to rest. It looked, Arthur had to admit, like the sort of impact that a blown tyre or a night-time misjudgment might have caused.

Eames’s hand fell on his shoulder, rested briefly and withdrew. “Don’t dwell on it. We debrief once. Learn the lessons. Then you put it behind you, for good.”

Eames swiped the back of his hand over one glistening cheek. His eyes flicked efficiently over the horizon, one of those battlefield habits that made Arthur wonder what he’d have been like to serve under as a commander, back in the day. The fickle, reckless energy that irritated the point man in Arthur would have made a very different impression on a young soldier with dreams of writing his name on history. There was a bulletproof air about Eames, as if he could walk through a grenade blast one moment, and lean back laughing about it in a bar that same evening. And underneath that were the qualities that Arthur found himself drawn to – his quick-fire flexibility that made him full of surprises, his tentatively shared intellect. Yeah, Arthur could have completely lost his shit over that sort of combination, once upon a time.

“The sort of guards posted out here in the badlands won’t be the sharpest tools in the box,” Eames said with a nod at the crash site. “If we’re lucky, their commanders won’t rule out the possibility of accident.”

The steam from the busted radiator was starting to thin out.

“Thanks,” Arthur said.

“All part of the job.” 

Except it wasn’t. When he cast his mind back, Eames had done a lot more than his job, pretty much every time Arthur had worked with him. He did it without fanfare, usually in the middle of a crisis when the team was too busy to notice. Then he took his cut, without pushing for a bonus, and disappeared back to some remote bolt hole in Africa or Eastern Europe. On this job, Arthur could practically see his presence, like a benign shadow, every step of the way.

In hindsight, the only surprise was how he could have been blind to it. Beside him, Eames’s shoulders were starting to slump with fatigue, now that Arthur no longer needed him to be purposeful and decisive. He made it all too easy to forget that he spent yesterday afternoon getting shot and beaten. 

“The smart thing is to get on the road right away,” Eames said. “In case that’s caught someone’s attention already.”

Arthur replied, “Sure,” and didn’t move for a few seconds. “How’s your arm?”

Eames glanced at his sling blankly. “Pretty shabby.”

“How can I help?”

Eames’s gaze flitted away, as if reluctant to disclose what he needed. There was a tension around his mouth that said he was in a lot more pain than he let on. 

Arthur stepped neatly around and kissed him. In the space of a single sharp breath, Eames’s good arm slid around his waist and pulled him in. 

It was the kind of kiss that shut everything out. The kind of kiss that Arthur needed right now. He drifted into it like a pool of clear water and let it envelop him. He curled his hand around the bound point of Eames’s elbow and kept it slow, holding nothing back. Both of them were ragged and sweat-drenched, all their nerves frayed down to a thread. They had no energy left to be seductive about it, to try to gain any sort of advantage. Their tongues slid together, clumsy and sweet. Neither of them did anything to quieten the slick, hungry sounds that slipped out between them. Arthur kept his eyes closed and navigated off sensation and instinct. He turned his head from side to side to rub their lips together, sparking light, electric pleasure and anticipation before Eames pulled him close to claim the depths of his mouth again. 

He decided to let Eames be the one to end it. By the time they drew apart, the sun had turned the back of his hair hot, and both of their faces were pink. 

“Let’s get going then,” Eames said in a husky voice that sounded like all the grit and all the authority had been soothed out of him. 

“Yeah,” Arthur agreed, without making any move to extract himself. “Sure.”

He slid two fingers under the knot of Eames’s sling to give his muscle a few moments’ relief from the dig of it. Eames’s hand remained fisted in the back of his shirt. The threat of capture, of execution – the whole Revolutionary Guard – seemed unreal, like a left-over splinter from an old dream. Wisdom couldn’t compete with the solid breadth of the man in his arms. Eames’s mouth was flushed and inviting, bitten and kissed into an irresistible invitation. But there was still the faintest flicker of uncertainty in the shifting colours of his eyes, something that anticipated a change of heart, a swift rebuff. 

It took a good while longer to kiss that flicker away.

Later, they set a slow pace back to the village. They had almost arrived before Arthur’s brain really kicked into gear. He started piecing together a summary of the job for his records, sketching out the acid remarks he wished to make on the execution of the role of point man.

Narcissism, self-destruction, egomania, suicidal tendencies ... you name it, their industry was rife with it. Not just Flynn, but most of the others too. Attitude of some kind really came with the territory. From the cold-blooded manipulators like Cobb, to the adrenalin junkies like Eames and Flynn, none of them spent all that much time in what might be loosely described as their right mind. Frankly, any sane person with the same freakish talents and moral ambiguity would be making ten times the money speculating in currency futures or consulting to a pariah industry like tobacco, armaments or coal.

Arthur just wanted to get the goddamn job done. He never needed his ego massaged and loathed having to waste his precious time on other people's. From now on, he was only going to work with the best of them. The ones he could count on. 

“That’s the last time,” Arthur said, mostly to himself. “I won’t do another job with him.”

“You’re right,” Eames told him affably. “Let’s not.”

The sun was strong, but there was a little of the crisp, cool morning air to disperse its heat. The grey mountains turned the horizon all smudgy and abstract, like something out of a painting. The smell of bread rose up from the village. He put Flynn behind him, for good. 

**

Somewhere on the other side of the border, a Taliban soldier spoke urgently to his commander. The helicopter was still hurtling towards them. Their lone anti-aircraft cannon couldn’t seem to land a hit on it. The chopper jerked left and then right, neatly side-stepping the shot from a missile launcher. He watched, open-mouthed, as its door opened just far enough for a grenade to sail out, exploding right in the heart of their base camp. And still it advanced. 

“Suicide attack!” shouted the soldier over the approaching rumble of the chopper’s engines. “It’s going to kill us!”

They turned to run, but they’d barely stumbled three steps when the shadow of the chopper crept over them. As it swooped, the soldier futilely covered his head against the beat of its blades and the almighty tornado of dust. There was a hideous splatter and a scream as his commander got caught on the tail blade. 

Just above him, the cargo door opened. A blonde woman in camouflage gear leaned out and struck him in the side of the face with a rifle butt. He didn’t catch what she said to him, but he knew enough English off the internet to recognise the word “Norway”.

He lay on the ground, watching dizzily as the helicopter lifted back into the sky, clearing the dark smoke that swelled out of the crater where base camp had used to be. 

For a flicker of a second, he caught the profile of the man at the controls. A steely glare and a rugged jaw, and a fractional turn of his mouth that spoke of unshakeable confidence in his own invincible talents.

“What a knob,” thought the solider, as a half-understood internet phrase suddenly became clear in his mind. “What an utter, utter knob.”

**

The end

**Author's Note:**

> First and most important note: thank you so much to Ba Rabby for the beta, many months ago now. I don't edit quickly, but look, I did get there at last! Your perspective really helped. 
> 
> Less important note: This has been the slipperiest, strangest story to write. 
> 
> It started with the scene in the Hobbit where the party makes camp for the night and Thorin stares into the darkness, brooding manfully on the Grievous Wounds He Has Suffered, while trusty old Balin tells Bilbo about how Thorin is The Bravest of All Dwarves, and also Stalked By Death, and also The Greatest of All Leaders. And I thought, if female characters got this kind of blatant, gratuitous talking-up, viewers would actually be sick in their mouths, but when it’s a bloke we’re expected to enjoy being hit over the head with their peerless virtues. And then I remembered Strikeback, where Richard Armitage’s character is pretty much massaged into heroism by a storyline that bends over backwards to get him shirtless, bloody, or in a fist fight (preferably all three) whilst dropping convenient beauties in his path to be saved. The urge to parody him was irresistible.
> 
> My mistake was setting the story in Iran, which I did because it was in the headlines at the time for Harbouring Nuclear Secrets. I hoped to strike a balance between my memory of the highly educated, generous, sophisticated and incredibly gracious people I’ve met in and outside Iran, against the one-dimensional regime that actually does run the country. It was going to end bleakly, with Nasrin about to go on and bring down the whole government via inception. 
> 
> Then something happened I could never have dreamed of. Without (or with … ?) the consent of the Guardian Council, the 2013 elections brought a closet moderate to power, and new president Rouhani started to talk about negotiations with the US – something that had been unthinkable for 35 years. This change seemed enormous to me. When the world got side-tracked with IS, Iran was maybe taking the first steps on the road that the regimes in South Africa and the USSR and East Germany and the IRA leadership have all travelled. 
> 
> So the political side of the story ended up twisting towards the positive. And I also felt more guilty and silly for having put together a story that focuses on the one-eyed regime that is so completely unrepresentative of the real Iran, and that could soon be consigned to history.
> 
> And now I feel silly for writing a note about politics on a shallow adventure story. But I wanted to get in first, before anyone tells me this isn’t the real Iran, and say yes, I know. 
> 
> The more important disclaimer is that I actually love Richard Armitage to bits. 
> 
> Also thanks to Ping, Brammers, Cal and Rai for wantonly encouraging this idea in its early days.


End file.
